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RUSSIA AND THE 
RUSSIANS 



BY 



^ 



) 



EDMUND NOBLE 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
<@bz 0toer?i&e $te#, Cambridge 

1901 



•A/7* 



COPYRIGHT, I9OO, BY EDMUND NOBLE 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



D ^tW 



NOTE 

The works utilized in the preparation of this 
Sketch include a number of volumes in English, 
French, German, and Russian. In order to avoid 
extending the list to the dimensions of a biblio- 
graphy, mention is made only of the more important 
works in Russian which have been consulted. They 
include : SolovieVs encyclopedic Istoriya Rossii s 
Drevneishihh Vremen ("History of Russia from 
the Earliest Times "), in six volumes, St. Peters- 
burg, 1895 ; also his Obshehechstupniya Chteniya 
o Russhoy Istorii (" Popular Readings in Russian 
History "), Moscow, 1895 ; Ustryalov's Russhaya 
Istoriya (" Russian History"), and Istoriya Tsar- 
stvovdniya Petrd Velihago (" History of the 
Reign of Peter the Great ") ; Belyaiev's Russhaya 
Istoriya do Reformy Petrd Velihago (" Rus- 
sian History up to the Reforms of Peter the 
Great"), St. Petersburg, 1895; Ilovaisky's Is- 
toriya Rossii ("Russian History"), Moscow, 
1876; I. I. Semevsky's Ocherky i Rashazy iz 
Russhoy Istorii (" Sketches and Stories from Rus- 
sian History ") ; N. I. Kostom&rov's Ocherh Bo- 



iv NOTE 

mdshnei Zhizni i JVrdvov Velihago JRusskago 
Naroda v xvi i xvii Stoletiyakh (" Sketch of the 
Domestic Life and Manners of the Great-Russian 
People in the 16th and 17th Centuries"); Mor- 
dovtsev's Russhiya Zhenshchiny (" Russian Wo- 
men "), in three volumes, and Russkiya Istoriche- 
skiya Zhenshchiny ("Russian Historical "Wo- 
men ") ; Milyukov's Ocherki po Istorii Russhoy 
Kultury ("Sketches of the History of Russian 
Culture "), St. Petersburg, 1896, and Glavniya 
Techeniya Russhoy Istoricheskoy Mysli ("The 
Chief Currents of Russian Historical Ideas "), 
Moscow, 1898 ; Dzhanshiev's Epohha Velihikh Re- 
form (" Epoch of the Great Reforms ") ; and vari- 
ous histories of Russian Literature by Polevoy, 
Pypin, Skabichevsky, and others. 

In the transliteration of Russian words the Eng- 
lish spelling has been for the most part followed. 
The a is pronounced as in " father ; " e as in 
" men ; " o as in " tone ; " u as in " root ; " i as in 
" need." The ch is sounded as in " church ; " sh 
as in " wish ; " kh (guttural) as in German " Ich." 
The Russian letter which some transliterate ui is 
here rendered by y, as in " story." For the ff 
at the end of many proper names the more accu- 
rate v is substituted. All the Russian words used 
have been transliterated according to their spelling 



NOTE v 

in Kussian. A phonetic rendering has not been 
attempted, since the language itself is not pho- 
netic. The initial of words, as well as the o in 
first syllables, frequently takes the sound of a: 
thus Ohd is pronounced Aha; Orlov — Arlov ; 
otechestvo (" fatherland ") — atechestvo ; Domos- 
troy — Damastroy ; Romanov — Bamdnov ; Bo- 
ris — Baris ; boydrin — baydrin. The e in clos- 
ing syllables sometimes has the sound of yo in 
" yoke : " thus pravezh is pronounced pravyozh ; 
Muraviev — Muravyov ; Soloviev — Solovyov; Tol- 
stoy — Talstoy. The final g of words is usually 
guttural, as in the case of Oleg, pronounced Alehh, 
though in 01 g a the has the same sound as in 
English. When z ends a word, it is pronounced 
like ss, as in prihdz — prihdss, and uhdz — uhdss. 
Pronounce Kiev — Kee-ev; and Tourgueneff — 
Turgeniev. 

E. N. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. The Land and the People .... 1 

II. Laying the Foundations 23 

III. How Russia became an Autocracy ... 40 

IV. Peter the Great and " Europeanization " . 59 
V. The Women Reformers 84 

VI. Revolt op the "Decembrists" .... 102 
VII. Emancd?ation of the Peasants. . . . 123 
VIII. "Nihilism" and the Revolutionary Move- 
ment 140 

IX. The Religious Protest 159 

X. The Story of Russian Expansion . . . 179 
XL Siberia and the Exile System .... 201 

XII. Language and Literature 227 

XIII. The Russian Future 254 



RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 



THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE 

Kussia, in the popular view of it, is regarded 
as a far-away country of but remote interest for all 
save a few of the western nations with whom it 
maintains more or less close political relations. 
We ourselves are apt to think of it, when we give 
it a thought, in terms of one or other of those con- 
ventional judgments which the world at large passes 
upon communities that from time to time compel 
its attention, but which it never thoroughly under- 
stands. Nor does travel always enlighten us as to 
the value for our culture processes of a knowledge 
of this long isolated empire in the European north- 
east. Extend our journey through Eussia as we 
will, we seem ever to find ourselves in few and 
poorly developed urban communities, with their 
increasing proletariat, where poverty, intemper- 
ance, and sanitary neglect go hand in hand, and 
where the distance between the impecunious classes 



2 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

and the rich seems to grow greater year by year ; 
in an empire of peasants where the land yields but 
a sorry subsistence to the people who cultivate it, — 
people in whose minds superstition has more or less 
usurped the place left vacant by education — and 
amid a general population of over a hundred 
million souls who continue to be held by a church- 
supported autocracy in a condition of political 
serfdom. It is hardly wonder that from such 
mediaeval conditions as these we should return from 
our trip disappointed, and with our minds made up 
that, however it may be with other countries of 
Europe, Eussia at least has nothing to teach us. 
Yet such a judgment is premature, and the degree 
of its inadequacy we can know only through a study 
of the country and its people much more profound 
than the tourist usually cares to undertake in his 
preparations for travel abroad. We have but, in 
fact, fairly to grasp something of the meaning of 
the strange vicissitudes and unique processes which 
make up the problem, to be led to recognize that 
the story of Eussia, instead of lacking in interest 
and value, offers one of the most instructive ex- 
amples of race development, of nation building, and 
of ethnic expansion recorded in history. 

The Eussian Slavs first became known to con- 
temporaries soon after the beginning of the Chris- 
tian era. The various physical and ethnic charac- 



THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE 3 

ters which they then revealed enable us to connect 
them at once, not only with the Slav stock, but 
also with the people who were to succeed them in 
various parts of European Russia. They were, 
for example, men of robust physique, with eyes 
ranging in color from blue to gray, with hair 
auburn, yellowish, or chestnut — characters which 
harmonize well as a means of identification with 
the closely-fitting trousers, the short blouse, and 
the high boots seen on the Scythian ornaments 
unearthed from the steppe tombs in Southern 
Eussia, and now displayed in the Museum of the 
Hermitage at St. Petersburg. 

In addition to these physical traits, the Russian 
Slavs brought with them into their new settlements 
various social and mental characteristics. Their 
religious system was a highly developed nature 
worship, based on a generalized conception which 
associated light with good, and darkness with evil, 
under circumstances of that conflict between the 
two which has supplied the foundation for innu- 
merable myths. The supreme deity was Svarog 
or Nebo (Sky). From the bright heaven thus 
personified, as the Greeks personified it in Zeus, 
shone Solntse (Sun), otherwise Volos, the solar 
deity. In stormy weather, when the lightning 
broke, it was Perun who hurled the shaft and let 
loose the thunderbolt. Ogon meanwhile ruled 



4 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

over fire and flame, while Strihog released or 
constrained the tempestuous winds. But Perun 
is sometimes used interchangeably with JSvarog 
when the creative power of the supreme deity is 
meant, the word being a derivation from the 
Lithuanian perieti, " to give birth," " to produce 
warmth." In this way, Svarog-Perun is said to 
have given birth to Solntse (Fo7os) the solar 
deity, and also to Ogon, the fire god. Kelated to 
this function of the supreme deity, with sugges- 
tions of a much more primitive attitude towards 
the environment, is the fact that the earth was 
worshiped under the title of Mother Earth {Mat 
Zemlya) with an added epithet (syraya) signify- 
ing " damp," " humid," in the sense of " quick," 
" live." The functions of the Greek Vulcan are at 
times attributed to Perun, who is thus made the 
patron of armies. So, by a similar extension of 
functions, Volos becomes the protector of cattle, 
and Stribog the patron of warriors. The solar 
deity in the narrower sense was Dazh-Bog, and to 
him the Slavs also gave the general overlordship 
of nature. Moroz (Frost) brought the dreadful 
chills of winter; Morena presided over the phe- 
nomena of death. The ancient hymns sing of 
Kwpalo or Yarilo, god of the summer sun, and of 
Did-Lddo, the goddess of fecundity. To Slav 
mythology also belong various subordinate per- 



THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE 5 

sonifications in the characters of heroes, giants, 
dragon-killers, centaurs, and vampires, together 
with a host of wood-spirits, water-spirits, river- 
spirits, and house-spirits. The Slavs had no tem- 
ples ; they usually worshiped in the forest, or on 
some hill made sacred to Perun. Nor was the 
institution of the priesthood known to them, re- 
ligious rites being performed by the elder or chief 
of the tribe for the time being. They believed in 
the life after death, and were in the habit of 
placing weapons, as well as food, in the graves of 
the departed. 

The Russian Slavs had a social organization 
similar to that which has been found to exist in 
other parts of Europe. It rested on the patri- 
archal principle of the absolute power of the father 
as head of the family. A number of families 
formed the mir, or commune, the affairs of which 
were administered by a council made up of the 
various family elders. The individual member of 
the tribe possessed the "court," or patch of land 
which surrounded his dwelling ; the land which he 
cultivated was the property of the commune. By 
combining several adjacent communes, the tribes 
formed a larger organization, known as the volost, 
or canton, the affairs of which were managed by a 
council composed of the elders of the individual 
communes, one of whom was chosen chief. 



6 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

The Russian Slavs were a kind-hearted, benevo- 
lent people. Their chief occupation was agri- 
culture. They knew how to make iron tools, and 
were familiar with such metals as gold, silver, and 
copper. The art of weaving was practiced by 
them; they kept bees, and understood how to 
make fermented liquors. They were all the same 
a deeply religious people. Their domestic life was 
characterized by a remarkable development of hos- 
pitality — a virtue of great social importance in an 
age when, owing to the great distances, the trav- 
eler was absent from his home for many days. 
The Russians lived in huts at some distance from 
each other. They had no villages, towns, or cities ; 
yet for the purpose of council they made use of 
certain earthen fortifications to which also they 
retired with their families in time of peril. When 
attacked by an enemy, they could use the sword, 
the buckler, the spear, the javelin, and sometimes 
the poisoned arrow with considerable effect. Ex- 
pert in forming ambuscades, they also excelled in 
the boldness of their onslaught when it had to be 
made in the open. Fighting there without the 
precautions which military knowledge would dic- 
tate, they scorned the direction of a leader, and 
threw themselves upon the enemy in the loose 
order of a mob rather than in closely ranked 
column, each man acting upon the inspiration of 



THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE 7 

the moment. As warriors, they were brave as well 
as self-reliant ; the courage with which they fought 
has been highly praised. Yet the boundless love 
of liberty which, as Karamzin tells us, they cher- 
ished, was in nothing carried to a more imprudent 
extreme than in their political arrangements. It 
was, in fact, this excessive individualism, one of 
the most genuine and easily distinguishable race 
traits of the Russian Slavs, which long inter- 
posed an insuperable obstacle to their progress as a 
race. With their moral qualities still undeveloped, 
lacking the restraint and self -discipline necessary 
to the building of a state, they had to acquire from 
the foreigner the power to cooperate for the pur- 
poses of a truly national life. 

In the early period, the Russian land was an 
irregular patch of territory reaching from the site 
now occupied by Voronezh on the east to the 
borders of Prussia, and from a point just north 
of Novgorod to the Carpathian mountains. To- 
day it has an outlook upon the Baltic, stretches 
its southern coast lines as far as the Black and 
Caspian Seas, and in the north holds an immense 
frontage along the Arctic Ocean. Once restricted 
to about one fifth of the territory we now know as 
European Russia, the Slavonia which the centuries 
have thus transformed spans the planet westward 
to the Pacific, and does this with a larger con- 



8 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

tinuous dominion than has fallen to the lot of any- 
other power. An expansion thus phenomenal may- 
be well worth Humboldt's magniloquent compari- 
son of its extent to the visible surface of the full 
moon. To its manifold benefits, nevertheless, be- 
long certain disadvantages of serious political and 
strategic import. The stimulating influences of the 
colonizing process doubtless saved the Russian Slav 
from the degeneration which, sooner or later, over- 
takes all merely sessile races. But colonization in the 
east of Europe has been wholly a land movement : 
it has called forth none of the characters of nations 
whose chief role in history has been that of mari- 
time conquest. And this for a double reason, for 
while nature gave the Russians an enormous stretch 
of territory to invade, she denied them that com- 
mand of the sea which we are apt to associate with 
all true national greatness. A glance at the map 
shows her everywhere tantalizingly in sight of the 
ocean without possessing any real control over it. 
The Black and Caspian seas are to-day inland 
lakes, the latter being absolutely isolated, the 
former accessible only through a difficult channel, 
open or closed at the will of the power dominant in 
Constantinople. Ice makes the upper Baltic un- 
navigable during nearly eight months of every 
year; moreover, the passage through it into the 
North Sea is at any time at the mercy of the 



THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE 9 

power commanding the straits between Denmark 
and Sweden. So far as the Pacific outlet is con- 
cerned, we can estimate its strategic value by re- 
membering its northern situation and extreme dis- 
tance from the heart of the empire. 

The mountains of Russia, again, are much too 
insignificant to have any direct culture importance 
attributed to them. The series of elevations known 
as the Valdai, some one thousand feet high, consti- 
tute the insignificant orographical feature of the 
European division. Nor do the more important 
Siberian ranges make of Russia a mountainous 
country, or entitle us to describe the characters of 
Russian civilization as having been in any sense 
determined by the influence of a mountainous en- 
vironment. The bulk of them exist where the 
population is thinnest — the only territory in 
Russia which suggests the culture-forming influ- 
ence of Switzerland is that of the Caucasus, and 
here the occupation is by non-Slav populations. 

The climate of Russia has a well-marked conti- 
nental character, with extremes of temperature 
which surprise the traveler accustomed to the 
milder seasons and more gradual transitions of 
western Europe. The openness of the country to 
the north wind, the lack of modifying influences 
from the Gulf Stream, make the winter of Russia, 
even in southern latitudes, one of extreme rigor ; 



10 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

on the other hand, a well-nigh tropical temperature 
may be experienced in July as far north as St. 
Petersburg, which has the highest latitude of any 
capital in Europe. From the absence of atmos- 
pheric moisture, which mountains contribute so 
much to develop, Eussia suffers much, the prevailing 
dryness of the country increasing, as we should 
expect, from west to east, to the considerable 
lowering of the fertility of large regions. Yet the 
Eussian plain, well-nigh horizontal throughout its 
entire length, enjoys the advantages of a well- 
ramified water system, which has been of enormous 
importance for the interests of national develop- 
ment. Its great rivers are of historic significance, 
and they bless the territories they traverse with no 
niggardly volume — the Dniepr, associated with 
Kiev, with the conversion of the Eussians to Chris- 
tianity, and with the early voyages to Constanti- 
nople; the Volga, "mother" of Eussian waters, 
the great hydrographic artery of the expanding 
empire whose centre was Moscow ; then, finally — 
to say nothing of many minor streams — the Neva, 
linked inseparably with the work of Peter the 
Great, and with the European period of Eussian 
history. 

The European territories of Eussia, with their 
distinct zones, though well defined by natural con- 
ditions, coDstitute a continuous system. The ab- 



THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE 11 

sence of mountain chains and valleys, which work 
to the segregation of life, and to its separation into 
distinct types, favors the natural unification of the 
land, and prepared it, so to speak, for the commer- 
cial relations which were finally set up between 
each economic region and all the rest. The pre- 
vailing unity of conditions also contributes to the 
homogeneity of the people who make such a con- 
tinent their home. The likeness of climate, the 
presence of vast territories of cultivable soil differ- 
ing little in the treatment required, must also be 
taken into account as among the influences tending 
to produce likeness of physical type, through 
generically common activities, as well as, in some 
sort, likeness in social life and ideas. 

Emphasis has already been laid upon the rela- 
tional significance of Russia's inconsiderable front- 
age to the ocean. This lack of maritime experi- 
ence has an inner meaning of no little importance. 
For the peoples of western Europe the open ocean 
was either an irresistible lure, perpetually stimu- 
lating to enterprise and adventure, or a rude as- 
sailant whose destructive moods schooled men to 
the temper, while it trained them to the habit of 
resistance. To southern Europe nature has given 
the deeply indented shore lines whose connecting 
Mediterranean waters had so fateful an influence 
not only upon the course of history, but also upon 



12 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

the development of human thought. Some, at 
least, of the western peoples drew from a moun- 
tainous surrounding, with its altitude, its variety, 
its inaccessibility, not only independence of spirit, 
but also originality of mind. What might not be 
expected from nations nurtured by the "mighty 
voices," as Wordsworth calls them, of sea and 
mountain? But the Russians were not thus favored. 
With the same nature for a nurse, another cradle 
was to be theirs — they were to be crooned over by 
another music. Their home for centuries was to 
be the boundless plain, with its far-off horizons ; 
it was amid the soughing of the forests, the sigh- 
ing of the steppe, that they were to grow to their 
maturity as a people. 

But they were not to be in any considerable 
degree a sessile race. Their early experiences, if 
the Aryan legend be true, had implanted within 
their veins the migrating instinct ; it had needed 
only the magic touch of the Varyags to start them 
on the march. Westward they could not go; a 
west already settled forbade it. But to the east 
there were tribes and peuplades with but slight 
tenure upon the soil ; agricultural races like the 
Finns, who lent themselves easily to absorption, or 
nomad peoples that needed only the thrust of a 
virile nationality to be pushed back into Central 
Asia, if not swept from the map altogether. The 



THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE 13 

stimulus to expansion must have come no less from 
the tree-clad north than from the open steppes of 
the south land; the forest enabled them to hold 
against all-comers the territories they won ; the un- 
obstructed plain provided facilities for movement 
which made it the historic marching ground of the 
nation. 

It is to some extent because of the lateness and 
rapidity of her expansion, thus consummated over 
land, that we look to Russia in vain for any early 
or considerable urban development. A people 
constantly on the march cannot pause often or 
long enough by the way to build up that splendid 
array of cities which constitutes so characteristic a 
feature of west-European civilization. Yet it was 
conditions more potent than the horizontality of 
her plains, than the migrating tendencies of her 
people, which for many centuries held Russia a 
stage nearer than her western neighbors to the 
nomad life which it was her destiny to displace. 
The presence of an enormous extent of soil suited 
to agriculture, the economic needs of an increasing 
population fitted only to gain its livelihood from 
the soil, and the sum total of the conditions which, 
perpetuating the peasant class, isolated it perma- 
nently from the culture, as well as from the state 
of well-being which cities make possible, if they do 
not always insure — it is causes like these which 



14 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

have deprived Eussia of those opportunities of a 
well-developed urban life that are indispensable to 
the growth of free institutions. And it is this 
deprivation which must have had far more influ- 
ence in accustoming the masses of the Eussian 
people to the idea of political subjection, in ex- 
tending their tolerance of autocratic power, than 
any which could be exerted by the local circum- 
stances of a personal lot, however difficult, or by 
the tyranny of an impersonal climate, however 
rigorous or long-continued. 

So much for the natural surroundings. What 
now of the human environment? The Eussian 
Slavs had settled in a territory already occupied ; 
in pushing out to the north, the south, and the east, 
they came into collision with three distinct peoples. 
To the west, in territories bordering the Baltic, 
were the Letto-Lithuanians, a tribe of Indo-Euro- 
pean speech. The regions to the north and north- 
east were occupied by the Finns, an Uralo- Altaic 
race, with numerous branches. The southeast 
country was mostly held by the Khazars, also Fin- 
nish, and by Turkic tribes known as the Pechenegs 
and Polovtsy. The northern Finns here described 
were for the most part passively absorbed before 
the advancing wave of Eussian colonization ; the 
bulk of the active resistance to the movement came 
from the east and the southeast, where the Turko- 



THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE 15 

Finnic peoples, being recent immigrants, were 
always in a state of fermentation. Here the 
Khazars were first encountered. Then the his- 
toric role of opposition fell to the Pechenegs. But, 
by the eleventh century, this tribe having pushed its 
way to the borders of the Black Sea, the struggle 
of the Russian princes is mainly with the Polovtsy. 
When the fourteenth century is reached, the pack 
has been again shuffled, and there is a new deal. 
Khazars, Bolgars, Pechenegs, and Polovtsy have 
all disappeared beneath the black shadow of the 
Tatar-Mongol invasion, which now covers with its 
eclipse the whole east of European Russia. 

The chief result of all these contacts and min- 
glings was that profound modification which, fusing 
Slav with Finnish elements, created the homo- 
geneous race stock which we to-day call Great- 
Russian. The influence of the Finn admixture 
appears in the large, bony frame, the high cheek- 
bones and sallow tint, in the acquired pecu- 
liarities of dress, manners, and customs, but, with 
especial noteworthiness, in the intellectual and 
moral traits of the modified people. The Great- 
Russians emerge from their contact with the Uralo- 
Altaic races with more solidity of character, 
greater power of endurance, and a degree of perse- 
verance and enterprise which they did not origi- 
nally possess — with race traits, in a word, which 



16 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

differentiate them in a striking way from the 
otherwise gifted, but more lively and variable, 
Poles and Little-Russians, the latter of whom, by 
the way, were much less radically modified as a 
result of their contact with the Tatar peoples of 
the southeast. 

Not less important, if more extended in time, 
was the culture assimilation of Russia. In the 
matter of religion, excluding the sectarians, this 
process may be said to have completed itself for 
the masses of the people. It is true that the Chris- 
tianity they embraced so early as the tenth century 
came to them from Constantinople, and was thus 
weighted with political elements which the rest of 
Europe had already or has since outgrown. The 
fille decrepite de la vieille Home, as Duruy calls 
the eastern capital, could contribute little of value, 
beyond the mere rudiments of an educational sys- 
tem, to the secular upbuilding of the Russian 
state. The faith, moreover, which satisfied the 
masses of the people in the early period of the 
national existence has proved in modern times 
impressively inadequate to the needs of the edu- 
cated, and probably of the bulk of the class known 
in Russia as cultured. And it is now become more 
than ever evident that if Russian civilization bene- 
fitted from the Byzantine influence, it did so be- 
cause it was Christian, and not because it was 
Byzantine. 



THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE 17 

The social assimilation of Russia to the west — 
an assimilation in ways of living, dress, ceremonial, 
etiquette — was a gradual and secular process 
which could only unfold its full activity in and 
subsequent to the time of Peter the Great. Yet 
in spite of it Russia has remained through the 
larger part of her history effectively isolated from 
the culture of Europe. The consequent retarda- 
tion of the nation's development in its intellectual 
phase has given to Russian history some of its 
most peculiar and most interesting characters. 
The causes of this deprivation are not far to 
seek. It was natural at the outset that the face of 
a nation continually expanding westward should 
be as constantly turned in that direction. But the 
Russian Slavs were looking also towards Byzan- 
tium, from which they had received not only their 
faith, but also their secular instruction. In em- 
bracing Byzantine Christianity, in adopting a 
religious system antipathetic to their Slav con- 
geners of Polish nationality, who were of the Ro- 
man Catholic faith, they closed up the main line of 
expansion which western culture would otherwise 
have taken. Some part of the estrangement of 
Russia from Europe must be attributed to geo- 
graphical position ; the larger effect was undoubt- 
edly produced not only by religion, but also by 
language. 



18 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

The influence of Russian speech was wholly- 
isolating. Even when its words have been trans- 
literated into Latin equivalents, the elements dis- 
closed are found, on the whole, and with the 
exception of a few simple terms, to present few of 
those likenesses which, connecting words belonging 
to other and distinct members of the Indo-European 
family, make an acquaintance with one of these 
languages a means to the easy acquirement of all 
the rest. And when to the obstacle of the nature 
of the Russian words themselves was added the 
obscuring influence of the script, — of the strange 
characters in which such words are written and 
printed, — the chasm thus created between Russian 
and west-European modes of thought became, for 
all ordinary purposes of international intercourse, 
impassable. After the invention of printing, it 
was the visible affinities of language rather than 
the hidden and abstract affinities of race upon 
which the whole intellectual solidarity of the peo- 
ples of west Europe finally rested. The Poles and 
southern Slavs had the good fortune to connect 
their culture with that of the west, through books 
and newspapers printed in Roman letters; com- 
pared with the value of this instrument of assimi- 
lation, the type of Christianity they adopted was 
of minor importance. The Russian Slav had no 
such compensation. By receiving his faith from 



THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE 19 

Constantinople rather than from Rome, he bound 
himself to models of literature and types of 
political conduct dictated from Byzantium; by 
clothing his Indo-European speech in the worn-out 
garments of Ecclesiastical Slavonic, he severed his 
people from the currents of western thought with 
a barrier more formidable than any mountain 
chain, more unrelenting than any imperial ukaz. 

The wholly special character of Russian history, 
and not a little of its peculiar interest, come from 
just this separation from the west which physical 
situation, Greek faith, and language combined to 
maintain. It is only when we think of the peoples 
of western Europe talking languages mutually in- 
telligible, or so related as to be easily acquired, 
that we begin to appreciate how much the Russians 
lost from their exclusion, — not from the religious 
wars of the sixteenth century, nor yet from the 
Crusades, or from the struggle between the papal 
and the civil power, but from the intellectual move- 
ment which swept through the west, reinvigorating 
every department of human thought, and carrying 
the tide of its results even as far as the temples 
and cathedrals of Moscow, yet leaving there no 
more than the outward show of a renaissance which 
elsewhere seemed to recreate the inner life of indi- 
vidual and of nation. Unconnected with the joy- 
ous ebullition of feeling which gave rise to German 



20 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

minnesinger and French troubadour ; sharing lit- 
tle in the burst of genius which filled all the west- 
ern countries with the names of Michael Angelo, 
Eaphael, Correggio; without part in the literary- 
revival that made common European property of 
the writings of Dante and Ariosto and Tasso in 
Italy, of Cervantes and Lope de Vega and Calderon 
in Spain, of Camoens in Portugal, and of Shake- 
speare in England, — the Russians could make 
none of the contributions to human thought and 
progress which elsewhere came not from any indi- 
vidual people, but from the European family of 
nations, none the less unified by common intellec- 
tual interests because politically so far apart. 

If the young Slavonia was ill fitted to play the 
part of nurse to the physical sciences, still less 
prepared was she to act as the midwife of philo- 
sophy. Achievements like the discovery of print- 
ing, the invention of the telescope, were for the 
European, not for the Russian intellect. From 
the trading republics of Novgorod, Vyatka, and 
Pskov successful merchants might go forth in hun- 
dreds, but the enterprise developed was necessarily 
of a kind other than that which gave to the world 
its great navigators, headed by Columbus, or turned 
its attention to the vaster cosmic revelations of a 
Copernicus, a Kepler, or a Galileo. Even in edu- 
cation the Russian people were denied that solidar- 



THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE 21 

ity of culture which was secured to the countries 
of Europe by the university system as early as the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It was this liv- 
ing contact of nation with nation which, by pre- 
serving the continuity of the Graeco-Roman culture, 
made each of its inheritors a collaborator in the 
civilization of all the rest. And it was the absence 
of it that helped to keep Russia, throughout the 
period of her youth, under the tutelage of an east- 
ern culture that satisfied her religious longings 
without yielding scope for her intellectual develop- 
ment. 

The course of the narrative will reveal some of 
the results of this enforced retardation. We shall 
learn, for example, that, belonging to it by all the 
higher activities of her life, Russia could not re- 
main permanently separated from the west. We 
shall also recognize why the movement of assimila- 
tion, when it finally broke in full tide upon the 
Russians, should take the form of a violent reaction 
in which all arrears of past neglect had to be paid 
up in full. And we shall discover that the attitude 
of Russia towards western culture since the time of 
Peter the Great has been neither the willful dis- 
loyalty to national ideals, of which the Slavophils 
accuse her, nor yet the mere absorptive eagerness 
of a half- Asiatic race, which is ready to receive 
and assimilate anything, provided only that it is 



22 KUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

foreign, but rather — for those who can look deeply 
enough — the effort of a great people to enter fully 
into its intellectual heritage, with just such appear- 
ance of haste as any rebounding movement of 
national recovery from unnatural stress would be 
likely to show. 



n 

LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS 

The first suggestion of the romance there is 
in Russian history comes to us at the outset of 
our narrative. "We find it, if anywhere, in those 
humble circumstances wherein the builders of this 
empire of " a thousand years," as Bayard Taylor 
called it nearly half a century ago, cast about them 
for the foundations on which they were to work. 
A glance suffices to show that the conditions in 
which they found themselves were most unfavor- 
able for the development of a strong and durable 
national life. Their lot had been cast in the great 
plains of northeastern Europe ; here it was that 
from the fifth to the ninth century they had lived 
through successive periods of subjection, first to 
one and then to another of the semi-barbaric popu- 
lations who occupied that part of the world. The 
Goths had first oppressed them ; the Avars or 
Obrovs next became their masters ; finally, on the 
retirement of the Avars into Pannonia, they had 
come more or less under the power of the Khazars. 
The appearance of the Pechenegs, rivals of the 



24 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

Khazars, brought them in the ninth century a 
new lease of freedom, and it is amid the last traces 
of their subjection to the Khazars that the history 
of the Russians properly begins. 

The condition of the eastern branch of Slavs 
was then unpromising in the extreme. Through 
all the vicissitudes described — changes involving 
enormous racial displacements — they had emerged 
not only without important change of geographical 
position, but also without the manifestation of any 
sign of political growth. They not only lacked 
the consciousness of national unity, but were also 
wanting in the qualities which were to make it 
possible. Willing enough to submit to rule in 
their communes and volosti, they had refused to 
subordinate themselves to any general leadership, 
until the very conception of it had become anti- 
pathetic. What they now needed, after centuries 
of exaggerated individualism, was the impulse that 
should enable them to forget their mutual differ- 
ences and private dissensions in the sense of the 
common welfare, — should convert their loosely 
cohering tribes into a nation, and thus enable them 
to cast off the last relics of their subjection to the 
barbarous east. This impulse could come only 
from without, and it came from the Varyags, a 
tribe or people of Scandinavian origin, with whose 
organizing talent and military prowess they were 
already familiar. 



LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS 25 

The Varyags were called in the latter half of the 
ninth century. The invitation was extended im- 
mediately by the Slavs settled about Novgorod, 
and from these as also representing the Finnish 
Chuds, Kriviches and Vesses, with whom, at the 
time, they were more or less in alliance. The 
northerners had consulted together and formed a 
decision for themselves. " Let us seek out for 
ourselves princes," they had said to each other, 
" who will rule over us and judge according to law." 
So, in 862, the men of N6vgorod sent over sea to 
the Varyags, saying : " Our land is large and rich, 
but there is no order in it. Come and be our 
princes, and rule over us." Three brothers, we 
are told by Nestor, responded to the summons, — 
Rurik, Sineus, and Truvor, — but the early death 
of Sineus and Truvor soon left Rurik sole ruler of 
the Russian country. It was under his adminis- 
tration that the Slav tribes came to be definitely 
known to foreigners as Mussi, or Russians, — 
" Russ " being the name given by the Finns to 
the Swedes, who were thus identified with the 
Varyags as Scandinavians. The work of giving a 
certain national character to the Russian country 
and people was further continued by Rurik's suc- 
cessor and brother Oleg (879-913), who, with the 
aid of an army, attached to the Russian land the 
territories of all the southern Slavs, simultaneously 



26 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

releasing them from their allegiance to the Kha- 
zars. It was Oleg, moreover, who chose Kiev as 
his place of residence, and made it the capital of 
Russia. 

The first effort of the Russian Slavs at nation- 
building was thus due to the Scandinavians. 
Under the influence of the Varyag administration, 
the tribes had begun to surrender the various dis- 
tinctions which kept them apart. Not only had 
their local designations fallen gradually away, but 
every tribe, and every member of it, had finally 
learned to answer to the name of Russian. And 
though the Scandinavian influence had been un- 
able to prevent the irruption of the barbarians, 
it had compacted and strengthened the defense 
against them, and it had gone far to serve notice 
upon the outside world that the Russians were a 
people. It is true that the internal dissensions 
did not immediately pass away, yet, as the struggles 
for supremacy between the princes implied a nation 
over which supremacy was to be established, the 
very disorder which followed the coming of the 
Varyags could not have been without its educa- 
tional influence upon popular conceptions. Certain 
it is that after the arrival of the Scandinavians we 
hear no more of the quarrels between commune 
and commune, between volost and volost, which 
made the old order unendurable. That the Varyag 



LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS 27 

princes put the Slav house in order and taught 
the Russians how to govern themselves — taught 
them, above all, important and much-needed les- 
sons in city administration — is manifest. But for 
any deeper modification of Russian character and 
life we look in vain. The Varyags did not " edit 
the language," as the Normans edited English; 
nor was there a court in Russia at which the Norse 
tongue was spoken exclusively. The addition of 
ten words, according to Soloviev, marks the ex- 
tent of the impress which the Scandinavians made 
upon Russian speech. The northerners, neverthe- 
less, brought with them certain useful juridical and 
social ideas; most important of all, a system of 
military organization which was to serve for ad- 
ministrative purposes in Russia until the course of 
development submerged it under the all-embracing 
domination of an autocratically governed state. 

Nor were the Scandinavians the only foreigners 
whose work was felt in the founding of the Russian 
state. An influence still more profound was to be 
exerted upon this nucleus of a nation by the Greek 
priests and missionaries whose proselytizing in- 
roads upon the primitive paganism of the people 
had begun soon after the foundation of Kiev. 
The first Christian monarch of Russia was Olga, 
the widow of Igor, himself the successor of Oleg ; 
and though she failed to convert her son Svyato- 



28 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

slav (964-972), it was none the less reserved for 
her grandson Vladimir (980-1015) to become the 
champion of the new religion in Russia, and to be 
forever associated in the annals of the country 
with the historic ceremony by which, casting off 
their heathen faith, the Russians avowed them- 
selves Christians. Vladimir's first care, after his 
own conversion, was to baptize his sons ; his next 
was to order the destruction of the idols in the 
presence of the people, solemnly summoned to 
participate under penalty of being treated as the 
prince's personal enemies. The scene which fol- 
lowed, as described by Nestor, must have been 
unusually imposing. Gathered on the high cliffs 
of the Dniepr, the sectarians of the old beliefs 
— men, women, and children — were compelled to 
look down upon the humiliation of their divinities. 
It was the fortune of some of the idols to be hewn 
in pieces ; others were burnt with fire. The worst 
fate of all overtook the great image of Periin, 
with its head of silver and beard of gold : first 
lashed like a culprit, it was thereupon hurled into 
the flood from the heights. Then, at the word 
of command, the assembled thousands descended 
into the river, and, by words of the priest and the 
force of Greek ritual, were made Christians. 

The new faith was carried without much diffi- 
culty to the south ; it was in passing to the north, 



LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS 29 

the northeast, and east, along the line of the Oka 
and the Volga, that the greatest degree of resist- 
ance was encountered. In Novgorod, so much force 
had to be used by the local authorities that, in 
the words of a legend, " Putyatin (the war leader) 
baptized with the sword, and Dobrynya (uncle of 
Vladimir) with fire." At Bostov, bishops were 
driven out and missionaries massacred. The saints 
of the new faith triumphed in the end, yet they 
did so only by absorbing some of the attributes of 
the pagan divinities they could not wholly sup- 
plant. Thus, where Perun once thundered, it is 
the Christian Ilya (Elias), the deafening noise of 
whose chariot is heard as he drives through the 
heavens ; so Vlas, representing St. Basilius, has 
succeeded to Volos in the task of guarding cattle ; 
there has been a similar transfer of pagan attri- 
butes to St. Nicholas, St. George, St. Andrew, and 
to other personages of the church calendar. 

Superior to all forms of paganism, not only in 
the largeness and simplicity of its conceptions, but 
also, as presented by the Byzantine priests, in the 
splendor of its ceremonials, the Christian religion 
dominated the will while it fascinated the imagi- 
nation of Slav and Finn and Tatar alike. Yet its 
triumph over heathenism was the triumph not 
only of a higher form of religion, but also of the 
superior social views which it embodied. For be- 



30 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

liefs and practices indifferent or injurious to social 
welfare, Christianity enjoined forms of conduct 
conducive to human progress. Above all, it re- 
fashioned ideas regarding the sex relations. In- 
tensifying family affection by a process of concen- 
tration, it provided a new care for and interest 
in children, and thus brought into play a new 
altruism towards future generations. But it also 
did an important work in intervening between 
the slave and his master, between the ruler and 
his subjects. For when Christianity began to 
exert its influence as a national religion, the 
country was already in the grasp of a peculiar 
form of feudalism, which not only sanctioned 
slavery, but was the source of constant resort to 
civil war. 

The prevailing form of government in the early 
period was known as the " udyelny system," taking 
its name from the word udyel, meaning " share." 
It may be described as a compromise between the 
Scandinavian practice of parceling out territories 
among members of the royal family, and the old 
Slav custom of common property in the family, 
with provision for the rule of the elder, but a com- 
promise still further complicated by the right of 
primogeniture, or inheritance by the eldest son, 
imported from Byzantium. The central feature 
of the system — or rather custom, for it depended 



LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS 31 

wholly on compliance with usage — was the princi- 
ple of possession and rule by the family of princes 
and their descendants. In the Slav view of the 
relations between the princes, the land, however it 
might be divided and distributed, belonged to the 
gens, — to all the members of the Eurik family, 
— and every prince was entitled to a " share " 
during his lifetime. This he could divide and 
transmit to his children in the male line. But the 
territories thus descending to the sons from the 
parent did not become their absolute property, 
since the absolute possession of the land rested in 
all the descendants of Kurik. Besides inheriting 
the princely dignity, each son received his share of 
the paternal estates, but received it only for the 
period of his natural life, or until such time as he 
migrated to another territory. That the princes 
could give up one " share " for another was pro- 
vided by the system, and they did actually migrate 
from territory to territory. The occasion for 
changes of this kind was usually given by the 
succession of a new grand-prince to the throne of 
his predecessor at Kiev. For each son of a prince, 
by attaining to the princely dignity, also acquired 
eligibility for the position of supreme power in the 
Russian land. But actually to succeed to this 
power, to be a grand-prince of Russia, he had to 
be the eldest member at that time living in the 



32 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

whole family of princes. Thus, when the grand- 
prince at Kiev came to die, it was not any of his 
sons, not even the eldest of them, who succeeded 
to the vacant throne, but the eldest Eussian prince 
then living, in whatever part of the country he 
might happen to be ruling, — perhaps a brother, 
a father-in-law, an uncle, or a still more distant 
relative of the deceased. This eldest member of 
the Eurik family would at once vacate his princi- 
pality in order to become grand-prince in Kiev ; 
thereupon the next oldest prince passed to the 
principality thus vacated by the new grand-prince ; 
another moved into his territory ; and so the change 
went on by a process which usually resulted in a 
more or less complete " redistribution of seats " 
throughout Eussia. As, moreover, the "shares" 
varied in the degree of their material or their 
political desirableness, or in both, each prince 
naturally tried to move into the "share'' which 
should bring him nearest to Kiev. There was 
thus a constant procession of princes towards the 
richer and more desirable " shares," and therefore 
towards supreme power in the Eussian land. 

In the early days of the nation, when the princes 
were few, the working of the system was com- 
paratively simple. But the increase in the num- 
ber of the Eurik family soon made the satisfaction 
of the multifarious and conflicting demands thence 



LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS 33 

arising a most difficult, almost an insoluble prob- 
lem. Jealousies arose both within and outside the 
individual family of the prince ; there were not 
only quarrels over the grand-princedom, but also 
conflicts over individual " shares " among members 
of the same family. The Slav custom, as inter- 
preted by Yaroslav (1019-54), besides giving the 
supremacy at Kiev to the eldest of the princes, 
provided also for the supremacy of the eldest son 
in each individual princely family. The refusal 
of the younger sons to recognize this supremacy, 
together with the tendency of the elder to use his 
position autocratically by withholding the volosti 
from his younger brothers, — these were frequent 
sources of conflict. The princes, again, were not 
always agreed as to who was the eldest among 
them, the one qualified for the position in Kiev. 
The sons of the grand-prince, resting their claim 
on the Byzantine law, frequently demanded and 
fought for principalities which, by the Slav custom 
of inheritance, belonged to the eldest of the Rurik 
family rather than to the eldest son of a prince. 
Then came, with ever increasing force, the sources 
of quarrel arising through the excessive multipli- 
cation of princely candidates for " shares," and 
from the divisions and redivisions which such 
multiplication brought about. That this constant 
and well-nigh endless parceling out of the terri- 



34 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

tory did not indefinitely increase the number of 
the principalities is due to the fact that, while the 
land was being continually subdivided to make 
provision for new claimants, the territorial desig- 
nations remained unchanged. It is therefore for 
this reason that, from the middle of the eleventh 
century to well-nigh the middle of the thirteenth, 
the chief divisions of Russia continued to be the 
principalities of Smolensk (including the Volga, 
Dniepr, and Duna) ; Kiev (with its dependent 
Pereyaslavl, and the appanages of Vyshegorod, 
Byelgorod, and Torchesk) ; Chernigov (right bank 
of the Dniepr, with Starodub and Lyubech) ; 
Novgorod-Syeversky (with Putival, Kursk, and 
Briansk) ; Ryazan and Murom (double princi- 
pality) ; Suzdal ; and Novgorod (with Pskov and 
Vyatka). 

The udyelny system, despite its immediate local 
causes and characteristically Russian form, really 
represented that stage of transition through which 
all tribes, p euplades, and nations pass on their way 
to political unification. To some extent, this is 
brought out by the functions of its chief officers 
as well as by the relations which existed between 
them. The prince of early Russian history 
(knyaz, from a root word meaning " progenitor ") 
is sometimes called udyelny prince, to distinguish 
him from the grand-prince enthroned at Kiev. 



LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS 35 

This ordinary or udyelny prince in Russia was 
supreme and independent in his own territory. 
He had his band of armed followers, known as the 
druzhina, built fortresses and cities, issued edicts, 
was chief lawgiver and judge, and could make war 
or peace. It was also the right of the prince, with 
the consent of the metropolitan, to appoint and 
dismiss the bishops, in case an eparchy existed 
in his " share." The grand-prince, on the other 
hand, had in addition rights and powers as su- 
preme head of the federated principalities. He 
was their chief federal officer ; upon him devolved 
the duty of making peace between the individual 
princes in time of conflict ; he had under his care 
the general foreign relations of Russia, and was 
the leader and commander of its united forces in 
time of war. He had no power of interference 
with the government of the other principalities, 
and could not levy therein either taxes or tribute. 

The authority of the princes thus rested upon 
military force, which they did not hesitate to use on 
occasion. But their prerogative was not an unlim- 
ited one. The people claimed rights of their own, 
and had been accustomed to assert them from 
an early period. The popular liberties were em- 
bodied, first, in the veche, or assembly, a sort of 
folkmote or people's parliament; and, next, in 
the "republic," a principality where the subjects 



36 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

had so far gained the upper hand of their ruler 
as to be able, by the imposition of conditions, to 
make his actions conform to their own will. That 
this form of folkmote existed in all parts of Eus- 
sia is beyond question ; it is equally certain that 
when the people were not present en masse, they 
were always represented in it by heads of families, 
elders, or chiefs. The power wielded in this popu- 
lar assembly may be described in the statement 
that it was accustomed to exercise, " on a larger or 
smaller scale, legislative, executive, judicial, and 
even political power." In practice the folkmote 
could pronounce for some particular member of 
the Eurik family, without absolute right to say 
who should be the grand-prince. That the popular 
assembly did usually intervene in political matters 
is sufficiently shown by the language in which the 
Tsar Ivan III. informed the people of Novgorod, 
in 1478, of the conditions he desired for his work : 
" No folkmote ; no elected magistrate ; and the 
whole state in the hands of the Tsar." 

In some parts of Eussia, moreover, commerce 
had combined with the tenacious adherence of the 
people to their free institutions to set up not only a 
superior civilization, due to more or less close con- 
tact and intercourse with the countries of western 
Europe, but also democratic forms of government, 
by which the power of the prince and of his 



LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS 37 

armed band was greatly limited. From the tenth 
to the twelfth century inclusive, Eussia was largely 
made up of federated republics, whose citizens, in 
the form of trade guilds, maintained commercial 
relations with the territories of the far east and 
north. The most important of these was the famous 
" Lord Novgorod the Great," — a republic with a 
metropolis of the same name, which had numerous 
tributary cities, its five volosti extending over the 
north as far as Siberia; its 100,000 inhabitants, 
and its subject populations to the number of some 
300,000 ; above all, a democratic form of govern- 
ment, in which the prince reigned only by binding 
himself to respect the rights and privileges of the 
citizens as embodied in custom or as expressed in 
the popular assembly. Another of these republics 
was Pskov, with chief city of the same name, situ- 
ated at the junction of the rivers Pskov and Ve- 
likaya, and known in popular annals, after the 
fashion of Novgorod, as " Lord Pskov the Great." 
Here, too, there existed a body of citizens who did 
not hesitate, on occasion, to oppose their interests 
to the demands of the prince. Subject also to 
Novgorod, but far to the east, was its prosperous 
colony of Vyatka, the hardy residents of which 
had carried with them into the country of the 
Finns the democratic institutions of Novgorod. 
In all these republics the folkmote was summoned 



38 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

by the ringing of a bell. Usually, also, the popu- 
lar assembly chose and dismissed the prince at 
will, and gave the final word in war and peace. 

It was to this warlike Russia of the earlier 
period, with its institution of slavery, its juris- 
prudence sanctioning private murder, and its 
udyelny system, giving to the ruler, where the 
popular element was weak, arbitrary power over 
his subjects, that Christianity brought some of the 
softening influence which it was so well adapted 
to exert as a religious system. The Byzantine 
ideas which came in with it were by no means 
always helpful ; they cast the blight of asceticism 
upon the innocent amusements of the people, in- 
troduced cruel punishments into the criminal code, 
and authorized the chastisement of the debtor, or 
his sale into slavery. Yet, as a religion, the new 
faith exerted potentialities for good which cannot 
be ignored. Speaking with an authority higher 
than that of princes, it was heard not only in 
the voice of the archbishop stilling the rebellious 
tumult of the popular assembly, but also in the 
words of the priest intervening between the slave 
and his tyrant master ; above all, in the command 
of the monk warning his ruler against the needless 
shedding of blood. Christianity helped to miti- 
gate the rivalries and feuds of the princes, and 
thus to diminish those conflicts which were the 



LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS 39 

chief scourge of the udyelny system. Yet the 
priests of the new faith did their most effective 
work in the interests of peace by championing, in 
season and out of season, as against the system of 
federated principalities, the Byzantine conception 
of a centralized government under autocratic rule. 
And it was the progress of Eussia towards this 
ideal of administration which was to characterize 
its life in the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and 
sixteenth centuries, as the persistence of the 
udyelny arrangements had been the salient feature 
of that life throughout the tenth, eleventh, and 
twelfth. 



Ill 

HOW RUSSIA BECAME AN AUTOCRACY 

When the twelfth century dawned upon Eu- 
rope, the Russian Slavs had made unmistakable 
progress towards a unified national life. In 
numerous struggles with the Finnish, Tatar, and 
Tatar-Turkish tribes to the east, at whose ex- 
pense they were continually enlarging the Russian 
boundaries, they had shown their ability and will- 
ingness to unite, when occasion demanded, in 
assertion of the nation's interests. Yet they were 
still far from being at peace among themselves. 
This is well shown by Pogodin's estimate that, in 
the 170 years subsequent to the death of Yaroslav, 
in 1054, Russia was the scene of eighty-three civil 
wars, and that the possession of the various princi- 
palities was contested in that period no fewer than 
293 times. The chief source of disorder was, of 
course, the udyelny system, which provided no 
undisputed authority in the land that everybody 
was bound to acknowledge, and which had such 
little legal effect that every prince practically 
claimed the right to interpret it in his own way, 



HOW RUSSIA BECAME AN AUTOCRACY 41 

and as his own interests dictated. Yet there were 
sources of conflict other than the mere interpreta- 
tion of the udyelny system ; for it must be borne 
in mind that under the appearance of a single po- 
litical type — the system of federated principali- 
ties, as the udyelny arrangements might be called 
— three sets of political ideas were struggling for 
the mastery: the Slavonic custom, which pre- 
vailed before the arrival of the Varyags, of be- 
stowing the highest dignity in the gift of the gens, 
or family, upon its eldest member ; the Scandina- 
vian system, brought over by the Norsemen, of 
dividing out the land to the successors of the 
prince ; and the western theory, imported into 
Russia by way of Byzantium, which claimed the 
inheritance for the prince's eldest son. It was all 
these causes combined which make Russian history 
during the latter half of the eleventh century a 
dreary record of almost continuous fighting be- 
tween the rival claimants, and suggest the thought 
that, had not some unifying process come in to 
terminate the disorder, it might have been the 
fate of the Russian Slavs to end their experiment 
in national independence, as did other Slav tribes, 
their race congeners, in permanent subjection to 
one or other of the west-European powers. Such 
a process did intervene ; and it was a process sim- 
ilar to that which carried most of the western 



42 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

peoples from the condition of separatism pre- 
vailing in feudalism to the unity that finally 
brought a centralized authority under the monar- 
chical system. But it could not come as long as 
the traditions of the Kurik family remained domi- 
nant, and especially while power in Russia con- 
tinually renewed itself in the old capital of Kiev, 
which was the centre of those traditions. A new 
beginning of the national life was needed, — a 
complete departure from the hereditary principles 
which had so long reigned in the minds of the 
people, — and this beginning could be made only 
at a distance from the soil consecrated to the 
udyelny system. 

The change was of vital importance, for it was 
to carry the national life from a centre in which 
its traditions were rooted to a region with which 
the people had nothing in common. To the em- 
bellishment of the city of Kiev, after Oleg made it 
his capital in the year 883, all the subsequent 
princes had made contributions. Vladimir him- 
self (980-1015), who here effected the conversion 
of the Russians to the Christian faith, did much 
to beautify the city. He built a church, dedicated 
to St. Basilius, on the spot where the image of Pe- 
rtin had once stood, ornamenting its interior with 
holy icons and other articles of value brought by 
him from Chersonesus. To his munificence was 



HOW RUSSIA BECAME AN AUTOCRACY 43 

also due the erection of the Desyatinnaya Church, 
to the support of which he consecrated a tenth 
part of his income. Yet it was only in the reign 
of his son and successor — to whom we owe the 
first code of Eussian law, the Etisskaya Pravda 
(Eussian Eight) — that Kiev reached the height 
of its splendor. Yaroslav the Great, as he came 
to be called (1019-54), did much to carry the 
fame of the capital not only through Eussia, but 
also into foreign lands. It was under his instruc- 
tions that Greek artists were called in to decorate 
its churches. He spent large sums of money in 
the improvement of the city, erected in it many 
beautiful buildings, and finally surrounded it with 
brick walls. It was to Kiev, thus embellished, 
with its great fairs held in twelve separate market 
places eight times a year, that merchants flocked 
from every part of Europe and Asia. 

But Kiev was now to lose not only its beauty 
as a city, but also its prestige as the metropolis of 
Eussia, and the sacrifice was to be made in the 
interest of an outwardly insignificant and only 
half-settled territory in the forest region of the 
northeast. For while the princes had been fight- 
ing, the pioneer had been at work ; and in the 
colonies resulting from his activity there were 
coming to maturity certain political ideas which 
were to prove fatal to the old udyelny regime. 



44 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

The appearance of this colonial life which was to 
react with such reforming force upon the mother 
land coincides in an interesting way with the rise 
of the boy dry class in Russia. Originally a war- 
rior, — member of the prince's armed band, — the 
boydrin was often rewarded for his services by 
gifts of land ; and as he gradually acquired terri- 
tory, his significance for the social system, from 
being military, came finally to be agricultural in 
character. It was the wealthy boydrin, in fact, 
who, converted into a landowner, needed peasants 
to settle upon and cultivate his land. The con- 
quering of new territory by Russian arms made it 
necessary to provide for its settlement. And so 
the boydry promoted the colonizing movement by 
offering gifts of land and certain special privileges 
to all peasants who would migrate from the older 
Russia to the domains which had thus been ac- 
quired. 

The rivalry which was to destroy Kiev and set 
up a new type of government in Russia came from 
Suzdal, a region situated in the densely wooded 
forest lands of the northeast, with chief cities 
bearing the names of Suzdal, Vladimir, Yaroslav, 
and Rostov. It was in this part of the country 
that, by intermarriages between the Russian immi- 
grants and the native Finns, there was gradually 
being developed that new type of Slav to which 



HOW RUSSIA BECAME AN AUTOCRACY 45 

history was to give the name of " Great-Russian." 
The territory, by its distance alone, was eminently 
favorable to the new political ideas. The Russian 
peasants, moreover, who migrated to the Suzdal 
region, being from the country districts of the 
older Russia, not ouly knew little of the town folk- 
mote, but came with no fixed purpose of insisting 
overmuch on popular rights. Hence it was in the 
northeast that the grand-princes could develop 
without resistance the new political conceptions 
which had already struck root. The country had 
begun, in fact, to move from the old idea of pos- 
session by all the members of the Rurik family 
towards the thought of power concentrated in a 
single royal house which should rule continuously 
by direct inheritance. The grand-princes no longer 
complied unquestioningly with the custom of trans- 
mitting their dignity to the oldest member of the 
family of princes : they strove, as far as possible, 
to hand down territories, in each case, to the eldest 
son. And in thus working for the new ideas of 
government, they were powerfully aided not only 
by the church, which was interested, as we have 
seen, in reproducing for Russia the autocratic type 
of national administration peculiar to Byzantium, 
but also by the growing weakness of the popular 
assembly. 

The rivalry between Suzdal in the northeast 



46 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

and Kiev in the south came to a head in 1169, 
when the prince of Suzdal, Andrei Bogolyubsky, 
son of Dolgoruky, formed a coalition of eleven 
princes for the express purpose of destroying the 
supremacy of "the mother of Russian cities." 
Marching against Kiev with a large army, Bogo- 
lyubsky took it by assault and gave it over to pil- 
lage. The fall of Kiev takes its significance as a 
turning point in Russian history, not from the 
triumph of one territory over another, but from 
the victory of the rival principles of administra- 
tion represented by Andrei Bogolyubsky over the 
old policy of the udyelny arrangements. These 
principles, carried out by Bogolyubsky at Vladf- 
mir, his official residence, were vigorously con- 
tinued by his successors ; and the territory of 
Suzdal succeeded in asserting its supremacy over 
the other principalities for some time after that 
ruler's death, in 1174. And though the older 
udyelny system survived the fall of Kiev for a 
while, the time was now fast approaching when 
the separate rulers in various parts of the country, 
yielding their powers to a single monarch, would 
gradually submit to the definite merging of their 
principalities in the unified territory of an empire. 
Long before the princes could foresee this result, 
an event occurred which, calamity though it was, 
did much to hasten the disintegration of the old 



HOW RUSSIA BECAME AN AUTOCRACY 47 

order. This event was the incursion of the Tatar- 
Mongols, a formidable body of Asiatics who had 
already, by their numerous conquests, spread uni- 
versal alarm through Europe. 

The Tatars first entered the territory which 
constitutes European Russia in the beginning of 
the thirteenth century, and inflicted crushing de- 
feat on a Russian force at Kalka, on the Sea of 
Azov, in the year 1224. They came again in 1237, 
and, after spending over two years in ravaging 
the country, sacked Kiev in December, 1240, and 
thenceforward had the Russians at their mercy. 
Thus began the historical " yoke " which was to 
weigh upon the nation for over two centuries, — 
that is to say, for a period of 237 years, from the 
acceptance of the Tatar-Mongol overlordship in 
1243 to the day when, in 1480, its exactions came 
finally to an end under Ivan the Great. It was a 
subjection as humiliating as any recorded in his- 
tory; and yet, having regard to the enormous 
numerical superiority of the invaders, to the fact 
that only the nobles and the citizen class bore arms, 
to the lack of defensive unity between the differ- 
ent political divisions of the country, and to the 
military weakness of Russia due to long-continued 
civil strife, the defeat can only be viewed as in- 
evitable. 

We may distinguish between two periods of the 



48 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

"yoke." In the first of these, extending from 
1243 to 1328, the whole of the Eussian country 
was in the power of the Tatar-Mongols. In the 
second, only the eastern portions of Russia acknow- 
ledged the sway of the Asiatic conquerors. The 
worst features of the subjection came in the second 
half of the thirteenth and in the course of the 
fourteenth century. The princes of Lithuania 
were the first to free themselves from the tyranny 
of the invader, but they did so only by severing 
their territory from the rest of the Eussian land. 
The Tatar khans originally had their seat at Sarai, 
on the Lower Volga, which became the capital of the 
Tatar empire known as the Kipchak, or the Golden 
Horde. For a time they acknowledged the over- 
lordship of the chiefs of the Mongol nation in 
Asia, and were thus successively vassals of Chingis 
Khan, Oktai, Kuyuk, and Mangu. But when 
Khubulai succeeded Mangu, in 1260, the Golden 
Horde broke away from its allegiance and became 
an independent empire, thus remaining until its 
gradual dismemberment. During the period of 
subjection the khans migrated from Sarai to the 
Crimea, and it was the agent of the Krym Tatars 
whom Ivan III., after having massacred his com- 
panions, sent home with the message that he would 
no longer obey them. 

The Tatar-Mongol yoke was one of both politi- 



HOW RUSSIA BECAME AN AUTOCRACY 49 

cal and financial subjection. The khan at Sarai, 
whoever he might happen to be, exercised the 
right not only of naming the grand-prince, but also 
of giving the various principalities and " shares " 
to persons of his own choice. Though for the 
most part continuing the custom of preference for 
the eldest, he occasionally appointed Tatar-Mon- 
gols, or men chosen outside the family of Rurik, 
to positions previously held by princes. The khan 
was the self-constituted judge between the princes 
in their quarrels, though he sometimes exercised 
this function by deputy, and could punish a recal- 
citrant prince either by flogging, imprisonment, or 
death. The chief burden of the Tatar-Mongol 
yoke was its imposition of tribute. This fell, in 
the form of a capitation tax, upon the whole Eus- 
sian country, and was payable either in money or 
in furs. In the early period of this foreign su- 
premacy, the collection of the tax was farmed out 
to the merchants of Khiva and Bukhara. These 
agents, under the direction of a superior officer 
known as the baskdk, took a census of the popula- 
tion, and collected a tribute from house to house. 
The incidence of the tax was the same for all 
classes ; but while neglect to pay was punished with 
the immediate enslavement of the poor, the default- 
ing rich were for a time enabled to evade seizure 
by the payment of exorbitant rates of interest. 



50 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

Many debtors were mercilessly beaten — treated 
to what came to be known as the pravezh — before 
being sold into slavery. The bashaki adminis- 
tered their office with such rigor that the people 
revolted in Suzdal (1262), in Kursk (1284), and 
in Kolomna (1318). The killing of one of these 
officials by the enraged populace at Tver, in 1327, 
led to the partial extermination of the inhabitants 
of that city. It was a great relief to Russia when, 
in the fourteenth century, the princes were ordered 
to collect the tribute themselves and pay it over to 
the khans at Sarai. 

The degree to which the life of the nation was 
modified by the invaders has been variously esti- 
mated. A certain, probably slight amount of race 
mingling was inevitable. The chief influence 
which the Tatar-Mongols exerted upon the Rus- 
sian system directly affected its administrative 
methods, and derivatively the political tendencies, 
the morals, and the language of its people. We 
are not dealing, it must be remembered, with a 
country which the Asiatic administrators turned 
aside from some other destiny into the path of ad- 
ministrative unity and autocratic rule. The Rus- 
sian people had begun to travel along this path 
years before the Tatar-Mongol invasion, having 
been forced into it by the waste and disorder of 
the udyelny system. What the Orientals did was, 



HOW RUSSIA BECAME AN AUTOCRACY 51 

not to create the direction, but to accelerate the 
speed of travel in a direction the Russians had al- 
ready set up for themselves, as well as to determine 
something of the nature of the results of the move- 
ment. And they did this by giving the country a 
common financial system, in which it was treated, 
not as a confederation of principalities, but as a 
nation ; by habituating the grand-princes, made 
agents of the khans, to the employment of auto- 
cratic power in the suppression of all popular 
privileges and democratic rights hostile to that 
central authority which the Tatar-Mongols aided 
them to enforce ; and, finally, by intensifying, 
through the arrest of all intellectual development, 
that separation of Russia from western Europe 
which was to cause the violent reaction associated 
with the name of Peter the Great. 

For several decades after the arrival of the 
Tatar-Mongols the capital of the country continued 
to be at Vladimir ; yet with the gradual change of 
the political system the need of a new metropolis 
became more and more manifest. And it was 
through the choice of the Prince Yury Dolgortiky 
that the rulers whose policy was to give imperial 
dignity to Russia came to be known as the " grand- 
princes of Muscovy." The name took its origin 
in a settlement on the winding Moskva, a tribu- 
tary of the Volga, whose green hills and fertile 



52 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

valleys had caught the eye of that prince as early 
as the twelfth century. Attracted by the aspect 
of the territory, varied in contour and picturesque 
beyond any other part of the Russian plain, he 
resolved to fortify the place, and there lay the 
foundations of a city. The first settlement began 
on the wooded hill called the Borovitsky Kholm, 
and the first church there erected took the name 
of " Deliverer in the Forest." Around the houses 
which soon followed was carried a wooden rampart 
wall, provided with a ditch to increase the diffi- 
culty of access. Traders were attracted to the 
city ; the common people from the country dis- 
tricts flocked to it, alike for the means of subsist- 
ence and of protection ; and though it suffered 
from the attacks of the Mongols under Baty in 
1273, Moscow grew slowly in size and impor- 
tance. It is mentioned first in the chronicles 
under date of 1147, implying a foundation at least 
several years earlier. The national hero, Alexan- 
der Nevsky (1252-63), — so called for his victory 
over the Swedes on the Neva (1240), — gave the 
city with its suburbs to his youngest son Daniel, 
who assumed the title of " Prince of Moscow." 

In its new metropolis the country made not 
only a new political, but also a new territorial 
beginning. The falling away of Galicia into 
western Europe, the absorption of Lithuania by 



HOW RUSSIA BECAME AN AUTOCRACY 53 

Poland, and the continued independence of Nov- 
gorod, had reduced the state now undergoing 
autocratic development to the principalities of 
Ryazan, with the udyely (shares) of Pronsk and 
Pereyaslavl-Ryazansky ; Suzdal, with the cities 
of Vladimir, Nizhny-Novgorod, Suzdal, Suzdalian 
Galich, Gorodets, and Kostroma ; Tver, on the 
Upper Volga, with the cities of Zubtsov, Kashin, 
and Kyev ; and Moscow. This diminution of terri- 
tory, being historically in the nature of a concen- 
tration, operated in favor of the process which was 
transforming the political aspect of the country. 
It yielded the nucleus which the grand-princes, by 
a policy of intrigue, of which corruption and crime 
were to be the familiar and ever recurring incidents, 
were to expand, with the aid of the church, into 
the tsardom of Muscovy. And it gave the oppor- 
tunity for that development of the new Eussia of 
Moscow and of autocratic government out of the 
old Russia of Kiev and the udyelny system, which 
we shall find to be less the story of the personal 
history of the long line of grand-princes who con- 
nect Andrei Bogolyubsky with Ivan the Terrible 
than the narrative of a policy to the realization of 
which all of them made important contributions. 

The founder of the Moscow principality, with 
Moscow as its chief city, was Daniel Alexandrovich 
(1294-1303). After him Russia was ruled over 



64 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

by nine grand-princes of Muscovy prior to the 
assumption of the title of Tsar by the tenth, Ivan 
the Terrible (1533-84). The whole of this period 
— about 300 years in extent — is characterized by 
the gradual development of the policy of political 
unification begun by Andrei Bogolytibsky in the 
twelfth century. The rulers who succeeded him 
were all men who, working for the ends of per- 
sonal rule and family inheritance, neglected no 
expedient of craft or cunning to strengthen their 
hold on the government. Taught in statesman- 
ship by the Tatars, whose financial agents they 
became, and encouraged by the national church, 
the grand-princes of Moscow devoted themselves 
without scruple to the work of breaking up the 
free republics, of destroying the popular assem- 
blies, and of gathering into their own hands the 
power which had been wielded under the old sys- 
tem by the udyelny princes. Relieved from time 
to time by heroic efforts to cast off the Tatar yoke, 
the Macchiavellian policy which had its centre 
first in Vladimir, later in Moscow, was pursued 
through three hundred years with every circum- 
stance of fraud and violence which the ingenuity 
of the monarch or of his advisers could compass. 
Ivan Vassilyevich, for example (1462-1505), did 
not hesitate to use the knut, the flesh-pincers, the 
bone-breaker, and the slow fire, in the campaign 



HOW RUSSIA BECAME AN AUTOCRACY 55 

against his enemies ; in breaking the resistance of 
Novgorod, besides deporting whole families, with 
the confiscation of their property, he cut off the 
noses and ears of the prisoners who had dared to 
defend the privileges of the republic. But the 
despotism of the grand-princes reached its culmi- 
nation only in the reign of Ivan IV., the first 
autocrat of Russia, most appropriately termed 
Ivan the Terrible. Here was a monarch whose 
early excesses of conduct, due partly to a morbid 
temperament, needed only the opportunities of 
absolute power to make of him a typical madman 
on the throne. His punishment of people whom 
he believed to be traitors — carried out with the 
aid of a bodyguard — has supplied to Russian his- 
tory one of its most lurid pictures ; for during the 
" terror " he maintained (1565-72) all conceivable 
and many inconceivable crimes were perpetrated. 
That Ivan slaughtered 1505 of the residents of 
Novgorod for having " conspired to surrender the 
republic to the king of Poland," and thereafter 
massacred whole families, until 3500 persons had 
been exterminated, was a mere commonplace of 
the outbreak. The interest of the slaughter for 
Ivan seemed to consist in the variety which he 
could introduce into it. Thus, the Archbishop 
of Novgorod was sewn up in the skins of wild 
beasts, and then thrown to the dogs. Ffnikov was 



56 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

drenched alternately with iced and with boiling 
water until he died. Chelyadin, dressed as a Tsar 
and made to sit on a throne, was there stabbed to 
death by his imperial master. Ivan also presided 
at the burning of Vorotinsky, raking up the coals 
around the body of his victim. The Tsar himself 
committed several murders, and ended by slaying 
his own son. 

The change which thus substituted an autocracy 
in Eussia for a system of federated republics natu- 
rally worked havoc with the rights of the people, 
as well as with the institutions by which those 
rights had been represented. It was not only that 
the principalities were absorbed by the grand- 
prince, and finally by the Tsar at Moscow, and 
that the princes, coerced into submission or ten- 
dering it of their own free will, one by one surren- 
dered their power to the central authority ; even 
the free republics, in the weariness of humiliation 
and defeat, were in turn compelled to put on the 
chains of the autocratic regime. During the period 
extending from 1472 to 1489, Ivan Vassilyevich, 
or the " Great," finally destroyed the independence 
of Perm, Novgorod, Tver, and Vyatka. The popu- 
lar assemblies were meanwhile broken up, and 
their bells confiscated and removed. 

It was a change, as we have seen, not wanting 
in resemblance to that which carried so many com- 



HOW RUSSIA BECAME AN AUTOCRACY 57 

munities of western Europe from the feudal to the 
monarchical system. By a process which supplied 
superior incentives to exertion in the ruler, at the 
same time that it diminished the cost to society 
involved by the rivalries, the antagonisms, even 
the civil wars of the old udyelny arrangements, 
the country in three centuries had gradually sub- 
stituted for the Slav custom of possession by the 
gens those western conceptions which justified the 
ruler in treating his inheritance as personal, and 
in transmitting it to his oldest son. Instead of 
being a dignity which belonged of right to any 
prince of Kurik stock, so soon as he should be- 
come qualified by age, the supreme power over 
the Eussian land had now come to be vested in 
a single family, to which, theoretically speaking, 
it henceforth belonged for all time. Whose this 
family should be had been determined, not by 
any choice of the people, but by the accident of 
circumstance. Once established at Vladimir, later 
at Moscow, its very existence excluded the remain- 
ing princes from any of the opportunities they 
enjoyed under the former regime. 

The existence of a ruling family in Moscow was 
naturally inconsistent with the titles and powers of 
the princes. The former rulers of Kussia went on 
for a time calling themselves princes and grand- 
princes. Yet the appellations were mere names, 



58 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

unburdened with the semblance of the power con- 
ferred by the old system. By and by, moreover, 
the very names grew meaningless, as the princes 
became mere functionaries of the monarch at 
Moscow, or took their part in the new system as 
members of the Tsar's personal following. And 
as autocracy developed, the old company of the 
prince's fighting men was replaced by a regular 
army ; the ancient druzhina, or armed band, be- 
came a court, while its individual warrior found 
himself metamorphosed into a courtier, or dvor- 
yanin. 

The most serious of all the changes wrought by 
the founding of the autocracy was that effected in 
the relation of the people, thus deprived of their 
popular assemblies, to the new ruler enthroned in 
Moscow. From being merely the holder, during 
his lifetime, of possessions which belonged to the 
whole family of princes, he had become the abso- 
lute owner of all those possessions. Meanwhile, 
the people, once his subjects, were now literally 
the slaves of a monarch who was invested with 
absolute power over their properties and their 
lives. 



IV 

PETER THE GREAT AND " ETJROPEANIZATION " 

Russia lived through her feudal period, and 
gathered strength for her autocratic system, in 
a state of almost complete isolation from the 
countries of western Europe. Severed from them 
not only by her geographical position, but also by 
the peculiarities of her speech, she had long been 
ignored by the science as well as by the diplo- 
macy of the west. It had become the custom, in 
fact, to treat her as a sort of unexplored border- 
land situated on the confines of Tatary, or some- 
where in the line of travel to the far Indies ; useful 
enough for purposes of investigation as well as for 
the study of barbarous races and their outlandish 
varieties of speech, but altogether unsuited as a 
community to be admitted into political alliance or 
relationship with the more progressive nations and 
races. To this ignorance was added, moreover, a 
fear lest the Russians, with whose race characters 
the lively western imagination had been at work, 
should come to a position of power in the councils 
of Europe. And though efforts were made by 



60 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

leading Europeans to prevent this westward ex- 
tension of Russian influence, the results reached 
were insignificant. For it was the destiny of 
Russia not only to come into close contact with, 
but also to enter into much of the heritage of, the 
older civilizations ; and nowhere was the story of 
this destiny so plainly written as upon the external 
aspect and inner life of the capital. 

The Moscow of the sixteenth century, trans- 
formed and embellished by the art of a renascence 
which, though Russia had no creative part in it, 
dowered the city with some of its choicest gifts, 
emerges from the long night of the Tatar-Mongol 
domination with its face, in which traits from the 
Orient still linger, definitely set towards the west. 
Beginning as a Kreml, or " fortress," the metropo- 
lis had carried its busy life beyond successively 
reared encircling walls far into the adjacent 
country. For a time this extension had given its 
suburbs the aspect of an immense village, hemmed 
in by cloisters with their outer fringe of gardens 
and orchards. Then, as Moscow grew and its divi- 
sions took shape, separating it into the Kitai-gorod, 
or "Chinese" city, the Byelgorod, or "White" 
city, and finally the Zemlyangorod, or " Earth- 
wall" city, the old capital of Russia began to pre- 
sent the general aspect which it still preserves. 
Radiating outward from the Fortress, the outlines 



PETER THE GREAT: EUROPEANIZATION 61 

of important thoroughfares like the Varvarka, the 
Sretenka, and the Arbatskaya had already shown 
themselves ; within the Kreml there had arisen not 
a few of the palaces and cathedrals which, even in 
the days of Ivan the Terrible, redeemed Moscow, 
with its 41,500 wooden houses, from the reproach 
of utter Orientalism. High over the crenelated 
ramparts of the Fortress towered the cupolas of 
the Arkhangel Cathedral, sheltering the remains 
of Russia's grand-princes ; of the Cathedral of the 
Annunciation, to which the Tsars came to be 
wedded; and the Cathedral of the Assumption, 
— built by the Italian architect Fioraventi, — in 
which, since the time of Ivan the Terrible, Russia's 
rulers have always been crowned. On the Red 
Square already stood the Church of Vassily the 
Blessed, with its bewildering conceits of form and 
color ; near by could be seen the Tower of Ivan 
the Great, and the famous " King of Bells." 

But the Moscow of the sixteenth century was 
something more than a mass of buildings touched 
here and there with a rude splendor that could be 
seen afar off, — with golden cupolas that flashed in 
the sun, or with bulblike church summits steeped 
in tints of the field and sky. It was the centre of 
those new currents of life which, setting in from 
western Europe, were not only to uproot the last 
remnants of the Tatar-Mongol inheritance, but 



62 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

were gradually to refashion Russia into more or 
less of likeness with the older world from which 
she had so long been kept apart. The process 
of assimilation had begun, in the early years of 
the udyelny system, with the relations — of inter- 
marriage, and also of court life — maintained by 
Yaroslav and his family with various west-Eu- 
ropean monarchs, as well as with the activity of 
the Novgorod traders, who carried the civiliza- 
tion of the west far over the Russian north. The 
nation had also benefited from the temporary 
absorption of some of her territories — notably 
Kiev and other cities of Little-Russia — by Po- 
land and Lithuania in the fourteenth century, 
since on the return to her of these territories, by 
treaty or conquest, in the seventeenth, she gained 
all the advantage of their extended contact with 
the west. Another stimulus to Russian develop- 
ment was the immigration from Little-Russia of 
priests, teachers, statesmen, and theologians, who 
did much to reawaken the intellectual life which 
had been so effectually suspended by the Tatar- 
Mongols. Still more important was the part played 
by Poland, with its court alternately Italian and 
French, as a highway through which the new 
culture was being constantly carried eastward. 
Moscow, meanwhile, receiving from all sources the 
envoys of the western civilization, had distributed 



PETER THE GREAT: EUROPEANIZATION 63 

their gifts far and wide. It was Moscow which 
opened its gates to the host of Italians and Greeks 
who flocked to the capital in the train of the 
Greek princess, Sophia Palseologus, on the occa- 
sion of her marriage to Ivan the Great (1472). 
Moscow was to be again in direct contact with the 
west when Polish customs came in for a time 
with the False Dmitry and his wife Marina, as 
well as in 1680, when Feodor married the Pole, 
Agafya Drushezkaya. It had long, moreover, 
been the policy of Russia's rulers to welcome, even 
from the doubting and distrustful west, all orders 
of professional men — doctors, engineers, artisans, 
military officers, etc. — who could be in any way 
useful in the building up of the new empire in the 
northeast. 

It was such a Moscow, then, as this which, 
having founded the autocratic system, was now to 
spend a century in its consolidation, — was to de- 
vote the hundred years which separate the death 
of Ivan the Terrible, in 1584, from the advent of 
Peter the Great, in 1689, to weighty tasks like the 
binding of the peasant to the glebe, the ousting of 
the Poles from Kussian soil, and the suppression 
of brigandage and disorder in the west and south- 
east. Such a century would be noteworthy if 
only because of the fact that, opening just as the 
Rurik dynasty is about to pass away forever, it 



64 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

ushers in the Romanov family, the first member 
of which to become Tsar was Feodor Ivanovich 
(1584-98). He drew his title to the throne va- 
cated by Ivan the Terrible from the fact that he 
was a son of Anastasia Komanov, the first wife 
of the dead ruler. Yet the situation was not 
without its uncertainties: first, because Feodor 
was a man of weak character ; next, because Ivan 
the Terrible had left a second son, Dmitry, from 
whom political complications were feared to such 
an extent that it was deemed prudent to send 
him and his mother Nagoi — the dead autocrat's 
last wife — away from Moscow to Uglich. For 
a while Eussia was governed, in the name of 
Feodor, by Boris Godunov, who had been minister 
to Ivan ; and it was Godundv who, having pro- 
cured the assassination of Dmitry, succeeded to the 
throne on the death of Feodor in 1598. Two im- 
postors, each pretending to be the dead Dmitry, 
successively disputed Godunov's title to the throne. 
The first was killed ; the second had the aid of the 
Poles, who succeeded in seating Vladislas, their 
representative, on the throne of Moscow. The 
peril of the nation was now great : it seemed as 
if a mere touch might overthrow the structure of 
Russian nationality which it had taken well-nigh 
800 years to erect. And it was in this perilous 
moment that the monotonous, unpicturesque, care- 



PETER THE GREAT: EUROPEANIZATION 65 

burdened life of the people blossomed forth into 
heroic deeds. Fired by the monks of the Troitsky 
Monastery, and by the personal appeal of a 
Nizhny-Novgorod meat merchant, Kuzma Minin 
Sukhoruky, Russia rose as one man to deliver its 
capital from the grasp of the invader. The march 
to Moscow had the character of a religious move- 
ment ; bishops and monks accompanied the cru- 
saders, and holy images of saints were borne at 
the heads of the columns. The victory was soon 
achieved, and then Mikhail Feodorovich Romanov 
(1613-45), nephew of the first wife of Ivan the 
Terrible — a fifteen-year-old lad, of thoughtful, 
studious habits — was made ruler of Russia. He 
reigned over the country conjointly with his father, 
Philaret Romanov, the Patriarch, for a period of 
thirty-two years. It was during this reign that 
Russia entered into relations with the England of 
James I. 

Mikhail was succeeded by his son, Alexei 
Mikhailovich (1645-76), the second of the Ro- 
manovs. The new monarch came to the throne 
not without some of the prejudices of his time, — 
a fact shown by the decree he issued (1649) 
ordering the destruction of all musical instru- 
ments. Yet the journey which he undertook 
abroad was to do much towards liberalizing the 
views of a ruler who had thus far seen only his 



66 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

own country. It is certain that from the wars 
against Poland he returned with that knowledge 
of the west which was to make him in more than 
a chronological sense the predecessor of Peter. 
His union with Nataliya, niece and adopted daugh- 
ter of his minister Matveyev, who had married a 
Scotchwoman, brought him into a society whose 
free manners won him over more and more to the 
culture of the west. The Tsar soon shocked the 
Orthodox by taking up hunting as his favorite 
sport ; his wife, meanwhile, caused no little aston- 
ishment by raising the curtain of her carriage in 
her progress through the streets. Finally, theat- 
rical representations were given in the German 
quarter ; and so delighted with them was the mon- 
arch that he caused a permanent theatre to be 
erected at Preobrazhensky. 

A single reign had thus sufficed to prepare the 
old order in Eussia for the doom which awaited 
it ; and when the uneventful regime of Feodor 
Alexe*yevich (1676-82) had passed away, the 
gloomy Byzantinism of the Eussian seventeenth 
century was already a lost cause. Yet the civili- 
zation of the terem 2 and the cloister did not suc- 
cumb without a struggle. Alexe'i Mikhailovich 
had been twice married: first to Maria Miloslavsky, 

1 The upper room to which the women of the house were usu- 
ally confined. 



PETER THE GREAT: EUROPEANIZATION 67 

by whom he had six daughters and two sons, 
Ivan and Feodor ; next to Nataliya Kirilovna 
Naryshkin, who had become the mother of his two 
daughters and one son, Peter. Age and numbers 
were on the side of the Miloslavskys, but the 
elder son, Ivan, was an imbecile ; in favor of the 
Naryshkins were the excellent physical and mental 
qualifications of Peter, as well as the law of Eus- 
sia, which recognized Nataliya as the actual widow 
of the deceased monarch. The choice of the 
boydry and of the patriarch Joseph Joachim fell 
upon Peter, and it was Peter who became Tsar 
elect under the tutelage of his mother. There 
now resulted a contest for the highest office in 
the empire between the sons of the two wives. 
In this struggle the interests of the Miloslavskys 
were championed by one of the daughters of 
Maria, Sophia Alexeyevna. By intriguing with 
the Streltsy, a sort of imperial bodyguard, she 
helped to bring on the change by which Ivan was 
associated with Peter in the government, Sophia 
herself acting as regent. But when, later, she her- 
self made a bid for the supreme power, the forces 
to which she appealed committed her to a mon- 
astery, and enthroned Peter Tsar of all the Rus- 
sias, at the age of seventeen. 

As a boy, Peter (1689-1725) had succeeded in 
acquiring Latin, Dutch, and German. His read- 



68 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

ing was desultory, confined mainly to historical 
accounts of his father and of Ivan the Terrible. 
But his active, curious, eager mind could not be 
restrained within national limits. He liked to 
hear of foreign countries, and was happiest when, 
in the society of one or other of the foreigners 
who came to Moscow, he could hear of the wonders 
of west-European civilization. His favorite resort 
was the German quarter, then a common rendez- 
vous for Europeans who happened to be sojourning 
in the capital. The society which met there, made 
up of men and women from the west, reproduced 
for Peter the manners and customs of which he 
had heard so much : there he could study not only 
modern fashions of dress, furniture, living customs, 
and architecture, but also the freer life of the 
western women, who not only took part with men 
in social intercourse, but contributed by speech 
and song to the general entertainment, and when 
the time for music came joined unrestrainedly in 
the dance. How much of Peter's predilection for 
west-European customs was due to the bright eyes 
and sprightly ways of Anna Mons, the German 
jeweler's daughter, with whom he there fell in 
love, will perhaps never be known. But it is 
hardly doubtful that it was the German suburb 
which aroused in the mind of Peter the ambition 
to transform the dingy, secluded, and largely un- 



PETER THE GREAT: EUROPEANIZATION 69 

joyous life of his own people into something of 
semblance with the happier conditions which pre- 
vailed in the west. 

Meanwhile, a new stage of his development had 
opened. As a child, his eagerness for activity had 
spent itself in swords, drums, and guns. To this 
he added, as he grew, an uncontrollable passion 
for boating. Instructed in shipbuilding and nav- 
igation by Franz Timmerman and Brandt, he 
devoted much of his leisure to marine pastimes. 
Only two months after his marriage to Evdokia 
Lapukhina, the daughter of a princely family, 
Peter started off to rejoin a boat which had been 
built for him on Lake Pleshchayev. By this time, 
he had acquired a knowledge of the art of war in 
the sham fights at his country residence of Pre- 
obrazhensky. Mock citadels were there attacked 
and defended, military manoeuvres planned and 
executed; in October, 1691, Peter conducted in 
person a charge with naked swords, and got so 
excited as to fight in earnest. The experience 
thus gained was applied by him in actual war, 
on the occasion of his campaigns against Azov, 
which capitulated in 1696. 

The Turks thus disposed of, Peter could next 
take up his long-cherished scheme of a journey to 
western Europe. In the spring of 1697 he jour- 
neyed with a considerable retinue to Zaandam, a 



70 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

small city on the coast of Holland. Peter was 
then twenty-five years of age, still a youth, yet 
of robust build, tall in stature, with strongly out- 
lined features, of a dark olive tint, which could 
assume a merry, a proud, or a severe, even wild 
expression at will. When in repose, his intelligent 
face combined with his stature to give him an air 
of what might be called distinction. But this im- 
pression was destroyed, in moments of nervous 
excitement, by certain convulsive movements of 
the body and countenance which he could not con- 
trol, and which made him not only shy, but also 
awkward, in society. Yet he had traveled to 
Zaandam, not for social entertainment, but to ob- 
tain a technical knowledge of the art of shipbuild- 
ing. When first seen moving about the city, he 
was attired in ordinary workman's dress, with a 
red camisole, short vest, wide trousers, and a tar- 
paulin hat. Hoping to gain the needed skill by 
actual labor in the shipyards, he went to work 
every morning on the Lynst Rogge wharf, spent 
the day in wielding the tools of a shipbuilder, and 
at night retired to a rude lodging, which is still 
preserved. While in Holland, moreover, he made 
inquiries into almost every branch of human 
knowledge and acquirement; visiting museums, 
factories, hospitals, barracks, and observatories, 
with such questions as " What is it for? " " How 



PETER THE GREAT: EUROPEANIZATION 71 

does it work ? " perpetually on his tongue. Study- 
ing anatomy with Ruysch, and natural history with 
Lewenhoek, he applied himself to architecture 
under Simon Schynooet, to mechanism under Van 
der Heyden, and to fortification under Coehorn. 
One of the brothers Tessing gave him lessons in 
printing ; in the atelier of Jeanne Koerten Block, 
where he posed for a portrait, he himself engraved 
a plate representing the triumph of the Christian 
religion over the faith of Mohammed. The Tsar 
was similarly active after his arrival in England, 
to which country he journeyed in order to complete 
his studies in shipbuilding. Settled in London, he 
spent most of his time at the shipbuilding yards in 
and about the metropolis, and could be seen going 
to his work every morning, with an axe over his 
shoulder and smoking a short Dutch pipe. 

Recalled to Russia by the insurrection of the 
Streltsy, Peter at once began the punishments, 
cruel beyond description, 1 which resulted in the 
complete extermination of the disaffected troops ; 
even after axe and rope had done their work, over 
one thousand being executed, the wives and chil- 
dren of the victims were banished from the capi- 
tal, and the people forbidden to give them either 
work or food. The Tsar was now free to take up 

1 " Rebelles ob silentii pertinatiam trahuntur ad torttiram, qtisa 
inauditse immanitatis fuit." (Latin Diary of Korb.) 



72 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

the scheme, in which his predecessors had failed, 
of opening up connections with western Europe 
through the Baltic, the shores of which had thus 
far remained in the possession of the Swedes. 
A pretext for war was soon found, and though 
the Russians lost the battle of Narva, Peter was 
able to bring his otherwise successful campaign to 
a brilliant close by the victory of Poltava, on 
which occasion Charles XII., who had invaded 
Eussia, was driven into headlong flight over the 
frontier. With the defeat of this northern paladin, 
Russia sprang into a position of power and consid- 
eration among the nations. Sweden, which for 
years had presumed to dictate the art of war to 
the Slav peoples, had now found her master, and 
the whole north acknowledged the appearance in 
their midst of a military colossus where only a 
semi-Oriental people had before been recognized. 
Peter had secured the Baltic for Russia. He had 
done something more: he had crippled Poland 
and Sweden, the only powers threatening him from 
without ; he had also rung the death knell of in- 
ternal disorder, and had gained at home the pres- 
tige needed for his reforms. 

For a time Peter's scheme for giving Russia 
an outlook upon western civilization had remained 
in abeyance. But after Poltava he felt sure of 
his European capital, and could write to Apraxin 



PETER THE GREAT : EUROPEANIZATION 73 

that, with the help of God, the first stone for its 
foundation had been put into position. The work 
now began in earnest. It involved the overcoming 
of tremendous natural difficulties. The whole 
country, at this point, besides being on the unin- 
habited confines of the empire, scarcely rose above 
the level of the adjacent Baltic. Any city pitched 
there, to say nothing of the difficulty of provision- 
ing it, would be in constant danger of inundation. 
Lack of food, lack of building material, lack of 
labor, an utter disinclination on the part of both 
workmen and officials to exile themselves in the 
interest of an enterprise which was generally re- 
garded as impossible of realization, — all these 
obstacles had to be conquered. Yet Peter did not 
hesitate. The refusals of nature he overcame by 
the sacrifice of thousands of lives, lost through 
privation and hardship in the prosecution of the 
task; the unwillingness of man he conquered by 
the power of fear, — by the menace of imprison- 
ment, of exile, of the confiscation of property, or 
of all these combined. Gradually the new capital 
acquired form, and Peter watched its successive 
transformations from a hut which he had erected 
for the purpose on the right bank of the Neva. 

In considering the success which Peter se- 
cured for his schemes, — to most of which the 
masses of the people were uncompromisingly op- 



74 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

posed, — we must take into account the help he 
received from devoted friends and confidential sub- 
ordinates. Among these were Patrick Gordon, a 
Scotchman, his chief counselor, who won fame in 
many of Peter's campaigns ; the Swiss Francis 
Lefort, whose house in the German slohodd was 
the rendezvous for Peter and his associates ; Feodor 
Alexeyevich Golovin, in charge of foreign affairs ; 
the two Dolgorukys, Prince Kurakin, Andrei Mat- 
veyev, Prince Ivan Trubetskoy, Peter Andreyevich 
Tolstoy Sheremetyev, Menshikov, Golitsyn, Ta- 
tishchev, Nepliiyev, the brothers Bestuzhev-Byu- 
min. Associated with Peter in his convivial hours 
we also find certain boon companions, in his friend- 
ship for who man element of buffoonery is visible : 
men like the Prince Feodor Romodanovsky, whom 
the Tsar appointed to the office of " Prince Caesar," 
and addressed as " Min Her Kenich " (My Lord 
King) ; the boyarin Ivan Buturlin, with the nick- 
name of " Polish King ; " and Zotov, familiarly 
known as " Prince Pope," a title conferred during 
a masquerade. Peter loved to act out the fiction 
that he was himself a servant : " for the sake of ex- 
ample " he would constantly abdicate his functions 
as Tsar in favor of Romodanovsky, and would 
humbly receive from " Min Her Kenich" the decora- 
tions and promotions he had earned by hard work 



PETER THE GREAT: EUROPEANIZATION 75 

in various subordinate positions. In the fleet this 
monarch was vice-admiral, in the army bombar- 
dier. After victories over the Swedes in 1713, we 
find him announcing in a private letter that he 
has been raised to the grade of general. After 
Azov he was promoted to a captaincy in the army. 
His notes of the year 1705 tell of " 366 rubles re- 
ceived for my work in the shipyards of Voronezh; " 
a year later he puts down 156 rubles " earned at 
Kiev ; " while in 1707 one of his items tells of 
pay received for " services at Grodno as colonel ; " 
another entry mentions forty rubles " received for 
my services as captain." One day, while at Istie, 
in the government of Kyazan, he entered a forge, 
worked for a while with a hammer, and then drew 
the payment for his labor. As master carpenter 
he received 366 rubles annually. 

Peter himself toiled in the foundations of the 
new capital, and it was here — in the city of " wea- 
riness, cold, and granite," 1 as Pushkin afterwards 
characterized it — that he hoped to create condi- 
tions favorable to his schemes of reform. From 
Moscow, and from the masses which it represented, 
little save resistance could be expected. The old 
capital had already been the scene of risings against 
foreigners, and the temper of its Orthodox inhabit- 

1 " SJciika, kkdlod, i graniV Sochineniya, p. 357. St. Peters- 
burg, 1870. 



76 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

ants was not seriously travestied in the testament 
left by the Patriarch Joachim, counseling the Tsar 
to expel all foreigners and heretics, and to pro- 
hibit their customs, habits, and dress. But in 
a city like St. Petersburg, attractive to foreign- 
ers, the customs of the West would dominate, 
and form a centre of the new culture, from which 
influences would go out to leaven the whole lump. 
And it was in " Piter," as the metropolis was famil- 
iarly called, that the monarch formed the relations 
with the young Livonian woman who was after- 
wards to become his wife. Catherine seems to 
have begun her strange experiences as a serf in 
domestic service. Taken prisoner by the Eussians 
at the sack of Marienburg, she had been the mis- 
tress first of Sheremetyev, then of Menshikov ; 
and it was in Menshikov' s house that Peter made 
her acquaintance. The Tsar was drawn to her by 
traits which strongly differentiated her from the 
type of terem woman so well represented by his 
first wife : not by her mental accomplishments, — 
for she was wholly uneducated, — nor yet by her 
quick intelligence, but rather by her liveliness of 
disposition, by the ease and freedom of her move- 
ments, by the naturalness of her manners ; above 
all, by the assiduity with which Catherine, who 
was a woman of supreme tact, accommodated her- 
self to his nervous, irascible, and explosive tempera- 



PETER THE GREAT: EUROPEANIZATION 77 

ment. She even accompanied him in his cam- 
paigns, and so won the admiration of Peter by 
her patriotic behavior in the struggle against the 
Turk that he publicly married her, and signalized 
the event by creating a new order in honor of his 
wife. 

An integral part of Peter's reform projects was 
the emancipation of woman. He began his attack 
on the customs which had condemned her to social 
seclusion by prohibiting accoucheuses from killing 
infants born deformed or out of wedlock. Another 
decree, putting an end to the practice of marrying 
the girl victims of the patriarchal system against 
their will, gave young people betrothed to each 
other the right to withdraw from the engagement. 
Not less important were the measures by which 
Peter drew women from their domestic retirement 
and isolation into the general life of society. Be- 
side insisting on women being present at social 
gatherings, he arranged special assemblies for 
their benefit. One of the reforms which gave 
the Tsar most satisfaction was the change of dress, 
by which he succeeded in abolishing what was not 
only an outward symbol of the old Russia which 
he wished to transform, but also a shackle on the 
industrial activities of the people. Peter's decree 
on the subject ordered the wearing of clothes cut 
in the French or Hungarian style. For a time 



78 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

the poorer people were permitted to retain their 
dress, but after 1705 the new regulations were en- 
forced without exception. The luxuriant Eussian 
beard had also to give way to the reforming zeal 
of a monarch to whom all memorials of ancient 
Eussia were odious. People who regarded the 
beard as sacred, — such as the sectarians, — were 
allowed to compound for the retention of the ap- 
pendage by the annual payment of one hundred 
rubles ; yet in return they were compelled to wear, 
like an order or decoration, the receipt for the 
money, given in the form of a medal, on one side 
of which was the inscription, "The beard is a 
useless embarrassment." Into the same limbo of 
banished things to which Peter had consigned the 
old Eussian dress and the patriarchal beard of his 
subjects went the habit of falling on their knees 
in the street when the Tsar passed in his equipage. 
Peter also abolished the custom of prosternatioD, 
— the remnant of the ancient practice of paying 
homage by beating the head against the ground, 
signalizing its abolition by remarking : " Where is 
the difference between God and the Tsar, if the 
same honors are paid to both ? The honor due to 
me consists in people crawling before me less, but 
in serving me and the state with the more zeal 
and fidelity." 1 

1 SolovieV, vol. iii. pp. 1357, 1358. 



PETER THE GREAT: EUROPEANIZATION 79 

It was also at this time (December 30, 1701) 
that the Tsar forbade the use of humiliating dimin- 
utives. But Peter made no effort to grapple with 
the evil of intemperance, then common enough 
not only in Eussia, but also throughout Europe. 
In his correspondence the Tsar formally acknow- 
ledged Ivdshka (drinking) and Yeremha (de- 
bauch) as his chief enemies, yet he did this in a 
way which showed that he deplored, not the moral 
evil, but the involved waste of time. Peter's atti- 
tude towards the drink question is best shown not 
only by his frequent bouts with boon companions, 
but also by the indignation, cumulative to the 
point of personal violence, with which he would 
resent any refusal to drink with him. Tobacco- 
smoking, which the narrow policy of the church 
had long held under the ban, was now encouraged 
by Peter, who made it a' source of revenue by 
granting a monopoly for the sale of the weed to 
an English manufacturer. 

Peter brought to an end the old classifications 
of rank which had caused so much quarreling 
amongst the nobility ; ordaining that service alone 
should henceforth confer the title to nobility, 
he substituted for the old system fourteen degrees 
of rank, giving to each degree in any particular 
department of service its equivalent in all the rest» 
He also reformed the administration of Russia, 



80 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

and did his best to suppress official corruption. 
A senate took the place of the old council of 
boydry. The first division of the empire (decree 
of 1708) was into forty-three provinces, grouped 
into eight governments, each province being in 
charge of a military general, and each government 
under a governor. The number of governments 
was afterwards increased, first to eleven, then to 
twelve, the whole being placed under the jurisdic- 
tion of a senate sitting at St. Petersburg. In 
the cities the merchants were divided into three 
classes, the first two being constituted guilds, with 
special rights and privileges. The municipal or- 
ganization, based on the German model, empow- 
ered the residents to elect burgmesters, and these 
to choose the mayor of the city ; the burgmesters 
and mayor coming together to constitute the coun- 
cil. The Tsar himself appointed the chief magis- 
trate. A capitation tax, in the form of an impost 
per head of the population, took the place of the 
former tax on "fires," or households. The de- 
struction of the Streltsy received its logical devel- 
opment in the maintenance of a regular army 
of 210,000 men, uniformed after the military fash- 
ions of the west, the weight of its support being 
borne mainly by the peasants. The reformer 
completed the subjection of the church to the 
state by abolishing the patriarchate and founding 



PETER THE GREAT: EUROPEANIZATION 81 

the Holy Synod. His breadth in religions matters 
led to the settlement of numerous dissenting 
churches, and gave to the chief thoroughfare of 
St. Petersburg its spiritual synonym, "Tolerance 
Prospekt." Meanwhile, Peter spared no effort in 
the interest of education. Expert teachers were 
brought in from foreign countries, and chosen men 
sent abroad for foreign study. In order to facili- 
tate the translation and printing of useful works, 
the reformer utilized an improved alphabet, — the 
modernized form of Ecclesiastical Slavonic, — in 
which, with certain modifications, Kussian books 
and newspapers are now printed. Besides estab- 
lishing elementary schools in various parts of the 
empire, he encouraged studies in the medical 
sciences, in natural history, geography; founded 
the Academy of St. Petersburg, as well as the first 
Russian newspaper, the " Gazette de St. Peters- 
bourg ; " and began the issue of a journal devoted 
to military affairs. The services of distinguished 
foreigners were utilized in the interest of the 
Russian culture movement ; among these was the 
famous Leibnitz, to whom Peter paid 1000 reichs- 
thaler a year, with the title of " State Coun- 
cilor." 

Peter began his reign at the age of seven- 
teen. He undertook the Azov campaign when 
twenty -three years old. He was twenty -five 



82 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

when he made his first voyage to Europe, and 
thirty-nine when compelled, after an unsuccess- 
ful campaign against them, to negotiate with the 
Turks in 1711. From 1713 to 1721, with the 
aid of his fleet of 200 vessels under command of 
Apraxin, Peter carried on those military operations 
against the Swedes which resulted in the surren- 
der to Russia, by the Peace of Nystadt (1721), 
of Ingria, Livonia, Esthonia, and portions of 
Carelia and Finland. On the termination of the 
twenty-two years' war with Sweden, the Senate 
conferred upon Peter the titles of " Great," 
"Father of his Country," and "Emperor of all 
the Russias." The reformer's second voyage to 
western Europe was made in 1716, Catherine 
accompanying him as far as Holland. 

Two years later, when Peter had reached the 
age of forty-six, he made the discovery that Alexei, 
his son by his first wife, was plotting not only 
against the reforms, which his idle, frivolous 
character made it impossible for him to under- 
stand, but also against his father, and thus indi- 
rectly against the state itself. The young man 
had surrounded himself with disaffected nobles, 
priests, and monks, and was maturing his schemes 
in direct connivance with the repudiated wife 
Evdokia Lapukhina. Peter took alarm at the situ- 
ation, as he did at anything which seemed to 



PETER THE GREAT: EUROPEANIZATION 83 

menace his plans for the future of Russia. In- 
duced to return home from his place of exile in 
Italy, Alexei revealed the chief facts of the con- 
spiracy. The information given led to the dis- 
covery that one Glebov, who had been carrying 
on a cipher correspondence with Peter's first wife, 
had prepared an address to the people. Peter 
punished the mass of the conspirators with tor- 
ture and death. Evdokia escaped with a flogging. 
Alexei was twice subjected to torture, and then 
condemned for execution. Two days afterwards, 
when an effort was made to force new avowals 
from him, he died under the knut (1718). A 
few years later the Tsar became convinced of the 
infidelity of his wife, whom he had just before 
(1723) solemnly crowned as Empress at Moscow, 
on account of her services to the state. He 
caused the head of the chief offender, Kammer- 
Herr Mons, a man strikingly handsome, to be 
publicly struck off ; he revenged himself upon his 
wife by exposing the head, immersed in spirits, 
for several days in her private apartment. Hence, 
while the official records ascribe Peter's death in 
1725, at the age of fifty-three years, to natural 
causes, the popular tradition of Russia continues 
to suspect Catherine of having protected herself 
from the reformer's vindictive moods by adminis- 
tering poison to him in his illness. 



THE WOMEN REFORMERS 

The destiny of Kussia to be " Europeanized " 
— to have its civilization assimilated, that is to say, 
to the civilization of western Europe — was not 
seriously interfered with by the death of Peter; 
for although that event brought the empire for 
over half a century under the control of women, 
their influence was on the whole favorable to the 
continuance and expansion of the reforms. First 
came the wife of Peter, Catherine (1725-27), 
the chief yield of whose reign of two years was a 
treaty with Austria. She was succeeded for three 
years by a grandson of the reformer, who, wield- 
ing power under the title of Peter II. (1727- 
30), secured a commercial agreement with China, 
and joined Prussia in the matter of a com- 
mon candidate for Poland on the death of 
Auguste II. After the death of Peter II., the 
nobility made an effort to secure a constitution^ 
which, otherwise liberal enough, provided for the 
renunciation of the reforms of Peter the Great, 
and the return of the government to Moscow. 



THE WOMEN REFORMERS 85 

Among the candidates for the vacant throne were 
the two daughters of the reformer, — Elizabeth 
Petrovna and Anna Petrovna (whose son became 
Peter III.). Of Ivan (Ivan V.), a son of Alexei 
Mikhailovich by his first wife, there survived two 
daughters : Anna Ivanovna, the Duchess of Kur- 
land, and Catherine Ivanovna, Duchess of Meck- 
lenburg. It was Anna Ivanovna (1730-40) upon 
whom now fell the choice of the " High Council " 
of the nobility, mainly representing the Dolgorii- 
kys and the Golitsyns, and it was she who, con- 
senting to become the successor of Peter II., was 
promptly made Empress. But on discovering that 
the new constitution imposed on her, instead of 
embodying the demands of the nation, as she had 
been led to believe, had its origin in a mere in- 
trigue, the new ruler repudiated the instrument, 
and, retaining the power which the conspiracy had 
conferred upon her, set about punishing the con- 
spirators, the chief of whom were removed with 
the wheel, the gallows, or by banishment. 

Anna, who was Duchess of Kurland, and had 
spent her early married life at the court of Mitau, 
could now indulge her German predilections to the 
full. Eelegating native Russians to subordinate 
positions in the state, she selected Germans as her 
courtiers, placing at their head one Biron, whose 
humble origin she sought to conceal by making 



86 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

him Duke of Kurland and " Prince of the Holy 
Empire.' ' That the real power of the administra- 
tion was wielded, not by Anna, but by this favorite 
of hers, is more than suggested by the name which 
it received, " Bironovshchina," as well as by the 
open hostility which the people manifested towards 
a regime which, ignoring native merit in the inter- 
est of foreigners, gave an Ostermann the charge of 
its foreign affairs, and placed the army in the care 
of a Munich, a Lascy, a Gustav Biron, and a Bis- 
marck. Yet Anna knew how to enforce the poli- 
cies which she thus delegated to non-Russians. 
Reviving the political inquisition of Peter the 
Great in the form of a Secret Chancellery, she not 
only wreaked vengeance for political disaffection, 
but punished for slights and offenses against the 
Germans, and did this with a refinement of cruelty 
not exceeded in the reign of her imperial father. 

As an Empress, Anna might be called imperious 
rather than imperial. With a brownish face, in 
which freckles were visible, relieved somewhat by 
eyes of an intense blackness, she could not well be 
called a beauty. Yet being unusually tall for a 
woman, largely built, and rather masculine in ap- 
pearance, she made an imposing figure against the 
background of the court whose members she knew 
so well how to keep under proper control. Her 
early experiences, moreover, had given a certain 



THE WOMEN REFORMERS 87 

" distance," not to say moroseness, to the manners 
which she carried into the social gatherings of the 
time. Her official life as an Empress had the ap- 
pearance, at least, of industrious zeal. Up every 
morning before eight o'clock, the hour of nine 
would find her transacting state business with her 
secretaries and ministers ; at noon she dined with 
the Biron family. But she loved ease too much to 
make a good ruler. Dividing her leisure between 
outdoor exercises, the playing of billiards, and the 
giving of costly entertainments at a time when 
the peasants were being " bled to the last kopek," 
Anna worked unceasingly to make her court the 
most magnificent in Europe. The loss of 20,000 
rubles at cards in the assemblies graced by her 
presence was an incident which disconcerted no- 
body. It was in these same assemblies that, at the 
ceremony of the Festival of Bacchus, instituted to 
commemorate every year the event of her acces- 
sion, each guest, on bended knee before her Ma- 
jesty, drank off in her honor a great bumper of 
Hungarian wine. Anna Ivanovna, moreover, was 
the Empress who provided her courtiers with the 
diversion of the notorious " ice wedding," at which 
the venerable Prince Golitsyn was sent home with 
his young bride to a residence built of ice, wherein 
the nuptial bed itself was constructed of the same 
material. 



88 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

The fact that for about two years after her 
accession Anna made her residence in Moscow 
does not fairly represent her attitude towards the 
reforms. The German influence was generally 
favorable to the work which Peter the Great had 
undertaken without being able to complete. Be- 
side abolishing the system of entail, which had not 
turned out according to the reformer's designs, 
Anna founded, at St. Petersburg, an institution 
which provided education for 360 nobles ; encour- 
aged the immigration of foreigners and artisans ; 
concluded a commercial treaty with Great Britain ; 
and completed the canal, begun by Peter, from 
Ladoga to St. Petersburg. The only wars of 
Anna's reign were that with France, due to the 
question of succession in Poland (1733), precipi- 
tated by the death of Auguste II., and the strug- 
gle with the Turks (1736-39), peace with whom 
Anna, after losing 100,000 men, obtained through 
the mediation of France. 

Anna Ivanovna died suddenly in 1740, after 
signing a decree transferring the throne to the 
three-year-old son of Anna Leopoldovna, daughter 
of her sister, Catherine Ivanovna. Anna Leo- 
poldovna had married Prince Anton von Braun- 
schweig, and her sou, Ivan Antonovich, now be- 
came Emperor as Ivan VI., under the regency of 
Biron. But a coup planned by Munich promptly 



THE WOMEN REFORMERS 89 

transferred the regency to Anna Leopoldovna, and 
Biron was deported to Siberia. The weak regime 
which followed was an invitation to the attack 
which the unpopularity of the Germans would 
alone have rendered irresistible ; and when, in the 
intrigues of the day, the choice came finally to be 
taken between the solid claims of a daughter of 
Peter the Great and the pretensions of the boyish 
Ivan Antonovich and Anna Leopoldovna, the issue 
was a foregone conclusion. Elizabeth had the 
military on her side, and her personal appeal to 
the soldiers in their barracks in the early days of 
December, 1741, when every man took an oath 
that he would die for her, determined the succes- 
sion for the next twenty-one years. 

The solemn crowning of Elizabeth (1741-62) 
at Moscow, amid great popular rejoicings, seemed 
to put an end to the administrative confusion 
and uncertainty from which Russia had suffered 
so much. The rule of the foreigner was abolished. 
The people welcomed in the new Empress one 
closely allied to them in blood, language, customs, 
and faith. The choice of Elizabeth, moreover, had 
caused the reversion of power from the issue of 
Alexei Mikhailovich through Ivan V. to the 
branch descended from Alexei through Peter the 
Great. It secured the triumph of the descendants 
of Nataliya Naryshkin, the second wife of Alexei 



90 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

Mikhailovich, over those of Maria Miloslavskaya, 
his first wife. No sooner, moreover, had Elizabeth 
thus definitely restored the traditions of her father 
than she took care to secure the perpetuation of 
power in her own branch by proclaiming as heir 
to the throne the son of her sister, Anna Petrovna, 
who had married the Duke Charles-Frederick of 
Holstein-Gottorp. 

As a social figure, Elizabeth Petrovna was one 
of the most engaging of the Russian tsaritsas. 
Brought up in the suburbs of Moscow as a girl, in 
close contact with the people, with whose children 
she had often joined in the old Eussian games, she 
carried the simplicity and naturalness of her man- 
ners into her later life at court. Her sympathetic 
disposition won her many friends. Her beauty 
was of the Eussian type — the eyes large and blue, 
the mouth small and pretty, the features mobile 
and full of expression. She was tall of stature, 
sprightly in her movements, especially graceful in 
the dance. Elizabeth spoke French, German, and 
Italian, in addition to her native tongue. Fond of 
society, she was also assiduous in promoting the 
welfare of her people. She encouraged commerce, 
and carried through various improvements in the 
system of public worship. It was she who, re- 
stricting the employment of torture in criminal 
cases, did away altogether with capital punish- 



THE WOMEN REFORMERS 91 

ment. Against the religious intolerance of her 
reign, exemplified by incidents of which the expul- 
sion of the Jews was one, must be set off the fact 
that Elizabeth liberated 55,000 debtors who had 
been thrown into prison, simultaneously reducing 
the amount of their indebtedness. 

Yet this imperial beauty was a zealous perse- 
cutor ; her panic fear of losing power led her to 
commit many acts of cruelty. She maintained a 
court of inquisition, and was occasionally present 
in its torture chambers as a spectator. It was she 
also, who, in order to punish a supposed political 
intrigue, caused the lovely Princess Lopukhina to 
be publicly whipped, to have the tip of her tongue 
cut off, and then to be banished to Siberia. Dur- 
ing the reign of this ruler the system of private 
denunciation, by persons hired to enter families 
for the purpose, was much extended. It is said 
that on Elizabeth's successor ascending the throne, 
he had to recall from exile some 17,000 persons 
who had become victims of that monarch's jeal- 
ousy. It is known that Elizabeth was privately 
married to Count Alexei Gregorovich Razumovsky, 
and had by him several children, including a 
girl brought up under the name of the Princess 
Tarakanov. 

The story of Elizabeth's external policy begins 
with the war against the aggressive Swedes, in the 



92 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

defeat of whom her generals forced the treaty of 
Abo, by which Russia determined the succession 
of its ally, Adolphe-Frederick, administrator of the 
Duchy of Holstein, to the throne of Sweden, and 
at the same time acquired all meridional Finland 
as far as the river Kyumen. The importance of 
Russia as a factor in west-European politics was next 
shown in the question of the Austrian succession. 
The death of Charles VI. had given the signal for 
a general outbreak, involving various European 
powers, and ending in the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle 
(1748). This was followed by the Seven Years' 
War (1756-63), in the course of which Frederick 
the Great, who had conquered Silesia, invaded 
Saxony, and had one of his corps defeated at 
Gross Jaegersdorff by the Russian general Apraxin. 
The campaign against Prussia was continued, with 
varying results, until 1761, when the Russians, 
having entered Berlin, overran and conquered 
Pomerania. The sudden death of Elizabeth (1762) 
saved Prussia from still greater disasters. 

The daughter of Peter the Great was succeeded 
by the reformer's grandson, the son of Anna 
Petrovna and Charles-Frederick of Gottorp. He 
became Tsar of Russia at the age of thirty-four, 
with the title of Peter III. The first act of the 
new monarch, whose natural unfitness for the 
duties of government had been aggravated by a 



THE WOMEN REFORMERS 93 

life of idleness and by faults of education, was 
to break completely with the foreign policy of 
his predecessors. Being a passionate admirer of 
Frederick the Great, whose portrait he carried 
about with him in a finger-ring, he formed a de- 
fensive and offensive alliance with the ruler of 
Prussia, and returned to that power all the con- 
quests which had been achieved by force of Rus- 
sian arms. In some other directions he seems to 
have made a bid for popularity. He protected Rus- 
sian commerce, abolished the Secret Chancellery 
and its torture chambers, put an end to the perse- 
cution of the sectarians, and recalled some of them 
from exile with gifts of land ; amnestied peasants 
who, under the influence of false rumors, had risen 
against their masters ; and pardoned a number of 
persons who had been banished in a previous 
reign, Munich and the Birons included. But his 
frivolous, undignified life, spent in dissipation and 
drunkenness; his preoccupation with the affairs 
of his Holstein estates to the neglect of the inter- 
ests of Russia, — all these things contributed to 
draw upon him the dislike of the people, and to 
make him especially unpopular with the mili- 
tary class, with whom he most came into con- 
tact. The situation was suggestive enough in a 
court where military conspiracy was fast becom- 
ing a settled tradition; it was rendered all the 



94 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

more critical by the fact that Peter had a formi- 
dable rival in his own household. 

The rival was his own wife, Sophia Augusta 
Frederica, of Anhalt-Zerbst, whom he had married 
in 1745. The mother of this German princess 
had destined her for the throne from early child- 
hood. Her marriage had already proved a failure, 
since it maintained the association of a young 
woman of developed literary tastes, acknowledging 
Voltaire as her teacher, and already deep in the 
study of west-European literature, with an un- 
faithful husband who, when not intoxicated, spent 
his leisure in reading stories of highwaymen, or 
attending performances of marionettes. But it 
gave her the opportunities she needed for the 
maturing of her plans. She had first, in accord- 
ance with custom in such cases, signalized her 
union with Peter by undergoing conversion into 
the Orthodox faith under the name of Catherine ; 
thenceforward she devoted herself to a scrupulous 
observance of her religious duties. Besides this, 
she did her utmost — by a winsomeness of dispo- 
sition which was natural to her, as well as by 
engaging manners which she partly imposed upon 
herself as the rule of her conduct towards people 
of all classes — to ingratiate herself with the 
people, and especially to obliterate, as far as pos- 
sible, the outward signs of her foreign birth. 



THE WOMEN REFORMERS 95 

In the meantime the relations between husband 
and wife had become greatly strained. Peter 
began publicly to declare that the son borne to 
him by Catherine was not his own, while Cath- 
erine, fearing to be relegated to a convent, placed 
herself unreservedly in the hands of conspirators 
who were plotting in her behalf. Among the 
most influential of these was the Princess Dashkov, 
whose popularity with the military was unbounded ; 
Gregory Orlov, Catherine's lover; and various 
other members of the Orlov family. The arrest 
of one of the conspirators served as a signal to the 
others that the time for action had come. Hav- 
ing received the oath of fidelity from three regi- 
ments of guards, Catherine marched to the Winter 
Palace at the head of a force of 20,000 men. 
The only people likely to complicate the transfer 
of power had been placed under arrest. Peter 
III., on being informed of what had happened, 
abdicated without a protest. He died four days 
later at Ropshcha, whither Catherine had sent him 
in charge of a detachment of soldiers. The Em- 
press, in her " Memoirs," attributes his decease to 
natural causes ; the confession of Alexei Orlov, 
made nine years afterwards, shows that Peter had 
been murdered. 

As the political successor of Elizabeth Petrovna, 
Catherine II. (1762-96) made a good admin- 



96 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

istrator, and successfully continued the policy of 
reform. The fifteen provinces she found existing 
were replaced by fifty governments, which under- 
went subdivision into districts. She introduced 
a system which separated administrative from 
judicial functions, and made definite the already 
existing class distinctions by establishing courts 
with special magistrates for the nobility, the citi- 
zen class, and the peasants. For the nobles she 
created a provincial organization, including an 
assembly, with a marshal as its chief functionary. 
City merchants were definitely divided into three 
guilds, according to the amount of capital pos- 
sessed. So far as the peasants were concerned, 
Catherine's regime was one of reaction. The 
Empress was the first to introduce serfdom into 
Little-Kussia. She prohibited serfs from making 
complaints against their masters, and authorized 
new forms of punishment for offending agricul- 
turists in the shape of exile to Siberia and enlist- 
ment in the army. On the other hand, she 
enlarged the freedom of the sectarians, restored to 
the Tatars of the Volga rights of which they had 
been deprived in the reign of Elizabeth, and per- 
mitted the Jesuits, whom Peter the Great had 
expelled, to live in White Russia. Catherine did 
much for the science and practice of medicine, 
and when vaccination was introduced into Russia, 
offered herself first to the surgeon's knife. 



THE WOMEN REFORMERS 97 

The secularization of the property of the church, 
which included about 1,000,000 peasants, was 
completed in this reign. From 1766 to 1768 
Catherine was at work on a new code of laws for 
Russia : to secure the discussion of its provisions, 
she called together a commission made up of 652 
properly accredited representatives from all parts 
of the empire. The somewhat pompous " Instruc- 
tion," which the Empress prepared for this commis- 
sion, full of high-sounding maxims, gathered from 
Beccaria and Montesquieu, — to say nothing of 
the sentiment, " For the Happiness of All and the 
Good of Each," which each deputy found in- 
scribed on the medal handed to him as his badge 
of office — seemed to promise a move at least in 
the direction of constitutional government for 
Russia. Yet the functions of the Commission, as 
interpreted by Catherine, proved to be little more 
than those of a great debating society, in which 
questions otherwise the most risky and forbidden 
were freely discussed. The Empress claimed to 
have been aided in her work of codification by the 
debates, yet no proposal or decision of the Com- 
mission was ever made a law of the realm. 

Petite in her youth, sprightly in manner, with 
a blonde German complexion lighted up by intel- 
ligent gray eyes, Catherine grew stout with ad- 
vancing years, yet she never lost the dignity of 



98 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

her position : court circles knew her as the first 
woman in Eussia ; it is the testimony of foreign 
observers that she moved in them " every inch an 
Empress." Nor did she, amid social pleasures and 
intellectual distractions, spare any pains to show 
the nation that she had its welfare at heart. In 
her conversations and writings it is " the Eussian 
people," " the fatherland," which are forever on 
her lips. It was in the interest of her subjects 
that she gave up the Protestant faith ; it was also 
to promote their good that she asked the physician 
to bleed her of every drop of German blood there 
might be in her veins. " No Livonian ruler 
am I," she was in the habit of saying, " but Em- 
press of all the Eussias." She thus had patriotic 
reasons for applying herself zealously to the study 
of Eussian, which she came to speak and write 
with considerable fluency. But she was also 
generally acquainted with languages and litera- 
tures, and had some literary pretensions of her 
own. For the litterateurs of France she had an 
especial predilection. She corresponded brilliantly 
with Voltaire and Diderot, with Zimmermann, 
Falconet, and Frederick the Great, as well as with 
Potemkin. Catherine was herself active as an 
authoress : she wrote comedies, poems, and a 
" History of Eussia," contributing to the Princess 
Dashkov's magazine, " Sobesyednik," a column en- 



THE WOMEN REFORMERS 99 

titled " Things that Were and Were Not," with 
Derzhavin and Eon Vizin for her collaborators. 
The Empress also took up lingual studies, made 
original investigations in the Finnish, Yotyak, and 
Cheremis languages, and believed (letter to 
Grimm) that she had discovered a Slavic origin 
for many west-European words for " river," " moun- 
tain," "plain," "valley," etc. She did much to 
promote historical work, especially studies in the 
native chronicles, her belief being that " no history 
provides better or greater men than ours." 

Catherine wished to be known not only as a 
legislator, but also as a philanthropist and a hu- 
manitarian. In her diary occur such sentences as 
these : "I have the welfare of the country in view 
— God is my witness." " I should be happy if 
my ideas were to contribute anything to the fame 
and welfare of my country." " Freedom, thou soul 
of all things — without thee, everything is dead." 
" I want the laws obeyed, but I don't want to have 
any slaves." "If you have truth and reason as 
allies, you can give them to the people." Nor 
was the Empress a mere phrase-maker. She 
occasionally revised the sentences of judges, and 
reduced terms of imprisonment after satisfying 
herself that they were excessive. Her tolerance 
towards the sectarians not only protected them 
from ecclesiastical fanaticism, but secured to them 



100 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

certain rights. Yet when her authority and 
power were in any way menaced, she forgot her 
literary favorites, and did not even remain true to 
her humanitarianism. She involved Franklin in 
her hostility to the revolting American colonists ; 
her fear of the French revolution and its principles 
manifested itself in dislike of Necker and La- 
fayette. In the same spirit was her treatment 
of Russian reform, the moment it ventured, in ex- 
tremely modest guise, to show itself at home. 
For when Radishchev, writing on the correct 
principles of judicial administration, dwelt on the 
evils of serfdom and championed emancipation of 
the peasants, he was arrested, tried, and sentenced 
to death — for doing, that is to say, what had been 
done before, though never in such inopportune 
association with a French revolution. The Em- 
press saved him from the gallows, but he traversed 
part of the road to Siberia on foot, as well as in 
chains, and remained at his place of exile till the 
reign of Paul. 

It was probably not Catherine's ambition to 
make of Russia a great military nation, yet there 
was something in war which, besides satisfying 
her womanly love of power, contained the promise 
of substantial contributions to the glory of her ad- 
ministration. Above all, it afforded to men who 
were already her favorites, or who might become 



THE WOMEN REFORMERS 101 

such, the opportunities they needed for distinguish- 
ing themselves. Catherine waged two wars with 
Turkey, one with Sweden, and a third with Persia. 
She had in the meantime been embarrassed by the 
insurrection of 1773, led by Emelian Pugachev, 
an escaped convict, who — in common with a 
number of previous impostors, all of whom had 
been executed — pretended that he was Peter III. 
It was only after a year of anarchy in the south- 
west, constituting a repetition on a larger scale of 
the disturbances created by the False Dmitry and 
Stenko Razyn, that the rising was suppressed. 
The Empress abolished the Cossack power in 
Little-Russia, and took measures for settling the 
unpopulated regions of the Volga, the Don, and 
the Dniepr. It was also in her reign that Russia 
participated, with Prussia and Austria, in the 
destruction of the liberties of the Poles, and in 
the partition among the powers named of the 
territory of Poland, the result of the three di- 
visions (1773, 1793, 1795) — taken together with 
Catherine's annexation of Kurland, also carried 
out in 1795 — being to carry the boundaries of 
Russia westward for a distance of about 350 miles. 
Catherine died after reaching the age of sixty- 
seven, on November 17, 1796. 



VI 



Paul L, the son of Catherine, promptly suc- 
ceeded his mother at the age of forty-three. He 
opened the new reign (1796-1801) with a declara- 
tion of his pacific intentions. His circular to the 
European courts, reminding them that his people 
had been at war since 1756, that they were ex- 
hausted by constant hostilities, and wished only 
for peace, seemed an early and an honest effort to 
promote Russian development without war. But 
Paul left himself a loop-hole of retreat in his 
accompanying declaration of hostility to France ; 
and when the successes of the Republic in Malta 
and Egypt seemed to threaten Russian interests, 
this fanatical opponent of French policy at once 
made common cause with Turkey against the armies 
of the Directory (1798). The campaign which 
followed surrounded with a new glory the name 
and fame of the Russian general Suvorov, but it 
left thousands of slain Russians on the battle-fields 
of Italy and Switzerland, and proved substantially 
a failure. From hating everything French with 



REVOLT OF THE "DECEMBRISTS" 103 

the hatred of a fanatic, Paul suddenly conceived 
a passionate admiration for Napoleon — a change 
of front which brought, first a rapprochement be- 
tween the two countries, and finally an alliance 
with Napoleon, in pursuance of which Russia de- 
clared war upon Great Britain. But the parties 
had scarcely found time for preliminary acts of 
hostility — such as the seizure of ships in Russian 
ports, and retaliatory measures by the English 
government — before an event of a startling char- 
acter put an end to the alliance. 

Paul had never been popular. He had ascended 
the throne with the uncertainty of his parentage 
suggested for the masses of his subjects in the 
coarseness of his features. To an aspect of pre- 
mature age he added ridiculous eccentricities of 
personal habit. Discarding the silk stockings and 
buckles commonly worn, he clung to the national 
style of boot with the trousers pushed inside ; went 
about wearing an old uniform coat which reached 
to his heels ; and never parted company with an 
enormous shabby cocked hat which, even on the 
coldest day, he carried under his arm. His wrinkled 
face — the head above it bald — wore a melan- 
choly, almost painful expression. It may have 
been the sense of his awkwardness which made 
him nervous : he was impetuous by temperament 
and despotic in character. The belief of thou- 



104 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

sands of his subjects that he was a madman found 
a further support in the antithesis between his 
plan, which aimed to restore the principle of abso- 
lute authority, and his actions, which contributed 
powerfully to destroy that principle. He alienated 
himself from the military classes by forcing the 
army into unwieldy foreign uniforms, and by 
imposing upon an unwilling soldiery the usages 
of the Prussian military bureaucracy. Senseless 
prohibitions caused him to be disliked by the offi- 
cials of his realm ; he offended the literary and 
cultured classes by the punishments he authorized 
for the use alike of words and of articles of dress 
which happened to be obnoxiously associated in 
his mind with the French Revolution ; the people 
he repelled by resuscitating the ancient custom of 
servile genuflexion, and by compelling everybody, 
rain or shine, to kneel in the street at his approach. 
By arbitrary conduct, by violent fits of temper, — 
he had threatened his relatives, especially his son 
Alexander, — Paul finally made himself odious 
even to his immediate surroundings. There were 
thus at hand not only the elements of, but also 
the pretext for, a revolution. It needed only 
the aggravation of the situation caused by the 
closing days of the alliance with Napoleon to force 
the conspirators to action. The scheme of the 
plotters, led by Count Pahlen, was that of a forced 



REVOLT OF THE "DECEMBRISTS" 105 

abdication ; but in the Tsar's bedchamber, with the 
military guard won over, it developed into a per- 
sonal encounter in the course of which Paul was 
thrown down and strangled with an officer's belt 
(March 23, 1801). 

To the coarse-featured Paul now succeeded his 
handsome son as Alexander I. (1801-25) — a 
tallish man of graceful carriage, with a high fore- 
head, a Greek profile, blue eyes, and a firmly-set 
mouth. It was under his administration that the 
power of Russia became more and more involved 
in the development, on the one hand of the ambi- 
tious projects of Napoleon, on the other of the 
various combinations formed j against the " man of 
destiny." After taking part in several of these coali- 
tions, Alexander was led — partly by the defeats of 
Eylau and Friedland — to join the French Emperor 
against Great Britain in the Treaty of Tilsit (July 
8, 1807), by which the Tsar, recognizing all Buona- 
parte's conquests and readjustments, was empow- 
ered to take Finland from the Swedes, Wallachia 
and Moldavia from the Sultan of Turkey. The 
provisions of this treaty received a further confir- 
mation in the famous interview between the two 
sovereigns at Erfurt, from which Alexander emerged 
more deeply committed than ever to the support 
of Napoleon — pledged, for example, among other 
things, to police the continent of Europe while the 



106 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

ally was working his will in Spain. But the re- 
action from Erfurt was characteristically Eussian 
and sudden. Removed from the glamour of Napo- 
leon's presence, Alexander had to acknowledge to 
himself once for all that with France under such a 
monarch no modus vivendi was possible. For this 
change of front there were political as well as per- 
sonal reasons. Under the title of " Grand Duchy 
of Warsaw " Buonaparte had practically revived 
the Kingdom of Poland — had placed it under the 
King of Saxony, and having proclaimed the eman- 
cipation of the serfs, had provided the Duchy with 
a civil code, a parliament, and an army. It was 
Napoleon's aggrandizement of the " Grand Duchy," 
by the addition to it (Treaty of Vienna, October 14, 
1809) of western Galicia, which proved one source 
of the rapidly growing misunderstanding between 
the two sovereigns. The actual rupture, precipi- 
tated by the French occupation of Oldenburg, 
gave Napoleon the opportunity, doubtless long 
matured, of invading Russia, and thus led to that 
fatal campaign of 1812, with its disastrous retreat 
from Moscow, which has pointed the moral of 
over-reaching ambition and unscrupulously- wielded 
power for all time. It should be added that the 
Russian campaign against Sweden had ended in 
the Peace of Fredrikshamn, by which Charles 
XIII. ceded Finland and Bothnia to Russia as far 



REVOLT OF THE "DECEMBRISTS" 107 

as the Tornea. As a grand duchy the new pos- 
session was guaranteed its constitutional privileges 
(1809). 

Alexander now called Europe to arms (1813). 
The new coalition against Napoleon, in which the 
Tsar was joined by England, Prussia, Austria, and 
Sweden, resulted in the occupation of Paris 
(March 13, 1814), in the dethronement of Napo- 
leon, the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty, and 
the signing of the Treaty of Vienna, by which the 
Powers determined the condition of Europe — 
among other things partitioning Poland for the 
fourth time. The Grand Duchy of Warsaw there- 
upon took the name of Kingdom of Poland, and 
Alexander assumed the title of its king (April 
30, 1815), though the duties of governor-general 
were discharged by his brother, the Grand Duke 
Constantine, who in 1823 married the Polish 
Princess Lowicz. In June of 1815, the cannon 
of Warsaw announced the renascence of Poland. 
Several months later (November 27), the Tsar 
granted Poland a constitution in accordance with 
the recommendations of the Congress of Vienna. 
To this same period belongs the manifesto, signed 
by several of the Powers, known as " The 
Treaty of the Holy Alliance," afterwards nick- 
named " The Alliance of Kings against Peo- 
ples." 



108 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

The internal policy of Alexander had for some 
time been one of great promise. Liberally edu- 
cated under the care of Laharpe, the young Tsar 
set out with broad views of his duty, and honestly 
endeavored to imbue the institutions of the country 
with the humane spirit of the age. He abolished 
torture, put an end to the confiscation of property, 
restricted the application of corporal punishment, 
reduced taxation, reformed the criminal code, and 
founded schools and universities. The first defi- 
nite measures resolved upon for the emancipation 
of the peasants were taken in this reign. Towards 
the sectarians, the Tsar adopted a policy of toler- 
ance and conciliation. For educational purposes, 
the country was divided into six circles, with a 
curator for each — St. Petersburg, Moscow, Dor- 
pat, Kharkov, Kazan, and Vilna. The work of 
preparing teachers for their functions was com- 
mitted to pedagogical institutions in Moscow and 
St. Petersburg; that of providing clergy was in- 
trusted to a system of ecclesiastical academies, 
seminaries, and schools. St. Petersburg, Kazan, 
and Kharkov were added to the list of cities pos- 
sessing universities. Under the influence of Spe- 
ransky, his prime minister, Alexander seemed for 
a time on the point of granting Kussia a system 
of parliamentary representation, but the opposi- 
tion of the privileged classes caused the scheme 



REVOLT OF THE "DECEMBRISTS" 109 

to be given up and its promoter removed from 
office. 

Such manifestations of liberalism as these did 
not long survive the Napoleonic wars. A variety of 
events had conspired to embitter Alexander ; and 
after the successive revolutions of Madrid, Lisbon, 
Naples, and Turin — all occurring within a year — 
had forced the signatories of the Holy Alliance 
to action, Alexander joined Austria and Prus- 
sia at the Congress of Laybach (January, 1821) 
first in a declaration denouncing the "false doc- 
trines and criminal associations which have called 
down upon rebellious peoples the sword of justice," 
and then in the scheme devised by Metternich for 
suppressing the revolutionary spirit throughout 
Europe. It was precisely, in fact, at this junc- 
ture that the Holy Alliance became a union of 
kings against peoples; and it was now that the 
same monarch who had been so solicitous that the 
French should have free institutions hastened to 
destroy the slender fabric of popular rights and 
free speech in his own land. A few more years of 
inglorious reaction preceded Alexander's death at 
Taganrog in December, 1825, and then the regime 
which had begun bright with the promise of mani- 
fold benefits for Eussia closed with a threatening 
sky. 

The intellectual ferment with which the reign 



110 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

of Nicholas (1825-55) was now to open came 
as the natural result of centuries of extravagance 
and misrule. With the passing away of Peter the 
Great, the autocracy which he further consolidated 
by successful war had taken on, in the growing 
splendor of its new capital, a pomp and magnifi- 
cence to remind one of antiquity. The city itself 
had abundantly realized the wishes of the re- 
former. Along its magnificent thoroughfares — 
one of them, the Nevsky Prospekt, rivaling the 
finest avenues of the West — lines of palaces, 
churches, shops, and habitations had arisen. St. 
Isaac's Church, the Admiralty Building, the 
Winter Palace, and many other features of modern 
St. Petersburg, were already visible. More im- 
portant still, this metropolis of the high north, with 
its dark winters and luminous summer midnights, 
was now in close touch with the western world. 
Prom its granite quays Russian ships, laden with 
Russian products, were making their way from the 
mouths of the Neva into the Baltic, and thence to 
the various ports of Europe. The successors of 
Peter had done much to develop this intercourse. 
Yet under their administration the maintenance of 
a " Europeanized " Russia had become a costly 
undertaking. The economical regime of the Tsar 
carpenter, who had labored with his hands, and 
had surrendered most of his patrimony to the 



REVOLT OF THE "DECEMBRISTS" 111 

state, was followed by an era of lavish wasteful- 
ness in state expenditure. Delivered from the 
traditions of the older Russia, the Romanovs found 
the excitements and dissipations of the new civi- 
lization irresistible. For nearly a century after 
Peter, as we trace it through the masked balls of 
Anna Ivanovna, the operas-houffes of Elizabeth, 
the literary dilettantism of Catherine the Great, 
the court life of Russia was one of ever increasing 
brilliance. Everything in art, science, and litera- 
ture which could add to the prestige of an ad- 
ministration seems to have been utilized. The 
decoration given for merit blazed everywhere be- 
side the laurel bestowed in mere favoritism ; and 
when native genius failed to supply lustre enough 
for adornment, foreign firmaments were denuded 
of their luminaries. Successful generals were 
content to walk in the train of imperial power; 
poets were willing to devote to individual woman 
the adulation meant by the Muses for nature and 
for mankind. The Russian court had sobered down 
when it again became the turn of men to govern ; 
yet the country was none the less irretrievably 
committed to the financial cares involved by its 
continual expansion, as well as to the external 
responsibilities in which Peter involved it when he 
made it a member of the European family. With 
every move of the Russian boundaries to eastward 



112 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

and to westward, new recruits were added to the 
growing army of officials ; with every further 
plunge into the complexities of European politics, 
the burden of militarism grew heavier and more 
exacting. Held entangled in the maelstrom of 
the Napoleonic wars for nearly a quarter of a cen- 
tury, Russia also had her struggles with Persia, 
her battles with France and England, and her 
continually recurring combats with Turkey — to 
say nothing of constant fighting which was the 
result of her increasing dominion in Central Asia. 
The unified empire was an undoubted improve- 
ment on the divided federal arrangements of the 
Rurik family ; the autocracy of the Tsars was 
better than the incessant civil war in which the 
country was held by the udyelny princes. But the 
amelioration thus secured was purchased at an 
enormous price, and its burden fell, not upon the 
high and mighty, in whose interest the state was 
magnified and embellished, but upon the humblest 
and yet withal the largest class iu the empire — 
the peasantry. It is the contrast between the 
misery and degradation of this class, and the 
luxurious magnificence which it fed through cen- 
turies of serfdom, that makes the story of the 
common people — originally called the " ill-smell- 
ing," the " black " people ; officially the " taxed 
classes," the " people bound to the glebe ; " and 



REVOLT OF THE "DECEMBRISTS" 113 

finally the " Christians," a word given by the 
Tatar Mongols — one of the most tragic chapters 
in Russian history. But the time was now at hand, 
when, through the moral influence of the cultured 
few who bear the banner of progress in Russia, 
the pomp and power at the apex of the social 
pyramid in Russia were no longer to be maintained 
by slavery at its base. 

The conditions were thus ripening for a protest 
by this cultured few, though up to the end of the 
reign of Alexander I., the country had passively 
acquiesced in the autocratic form of government — 
in the state church and the institution of serfdom. 
Under conditions like those which prevail in Rus- 
sia, any government may maintain itself provided 
the majority of the people either approve of, toler- 
ate, or are not sufficiently desirous of change to 
take the risk and danger of opposition. And if 
no adverse influences are developed, such regime, 
even when it is autocratic, may go on for a period 
practically unlimited. The only hostile force — 
apart from foreign conquest — which can work 
against despotism in government is the power of 
culture, through its influence on the minds of the 
masses : should a people finally become enlightened 
enough to desire a more liberal regime, the ad- 
ministration is bound to give way, for the reason 
that the character of a government is always de- 



114 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

termined by the practical consent of the governed, 
this being the case just as truly when the people 
choose as when they do not choose their rulers. 
The tragedy of the situation in Russia is that only 
a small minority of the people — the educated 
classes — have become enlightened enough to de- 
sire free institutions, and that their desire is over- 
borne by the practical consent given to an 
autocratic regime by the masses of the people 
who, besides being ignorant and superstitious, are 
also politically unambitious. 

The story of the development of this educated 
minority, which was to come into violent collision 
with the government on the accession of Alex- 
ander's successor, Nicholas I., is really the begin- 
ning of the story of the culture movement in 
Russia, and the study of it will help us to under- 
stand how it was that it became necessary to agi- 
tate again for the free institutions which the 
autocratic government at Moscow had swept away 
in the interest of national development. In reality, 
the early freedom of the Russians was that free- 
dom of excessive individualism which all races 
seem to possess in the beginning — the freedom of 
weakness, of division, of inability to cooperate for 
common ends. The Russian people were origi- 
nally so free, with their many princes, their demo- 
cratic institutions, and their popular assemblies, 



REVOLT OF THE "DECEMBRISTS" 115 

that they could neither guard against internal 
disorder nor cooperate sufficiently to protect them- 
selves from the common enemy. The centralizing 
power at Moscow, bad as were many of its personal 
aspects, came in as a discipline which was to give 
to loosely cohering and often hostile territorial 
divisions the solidity of a nation. It made all the 
difference in those times of universal antagonism, 
with the blast of war beating upon them from the 
east and from the west, whether the Eussians 
should be so much dry sand which the first wind 
would scatter over the desert, or the same sand 
compacted into a solid and enduring edifice. But 
when the discipline had done its work, and the 
empire had been consolidated, the opportunity 
came for a new freedom on a higher level such as 
would enable the people, without weakening them- 
selves as a nation, to exercise some of those rights 
of participation in government which the masses 
possess in the constitutionally governed countries 
of the West. The champions of this freedom were 
the educated classes. The forces in their favor 
were the forces of the culture movement which 
had been gradually re-fashioning Russian civiliza- 
tion into likeness with the civilization of Europe. 
The hostile conceptions against which they had to 
struggle were embodied in the ideas, the conditions, 
and the institutions of the time, and were espe- 



116 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

cially intrenched in the enormous power wielded 
by the government and the Church. 

Now, if the reforms introduced by Peter the 
Great could have affected all the people in 
like degree, the practical support given by the 
nation to the despotic form of government would 
gradually have been withdrawn. But the peculiar 
conditions made this common advance of the edu- 
cated minority and the ignorant masses impossible. 
The common people obtained from European cul- 
ture simply the outer forms of our modern civiliza- 
tion, such as improvements in the conveniences 
and comforts of life, — at first improved archi- 
tecture, better sanitary arrangements, then steam 
engines, railways, telegraphs, agricultural ma- 
chinery, etc., — and thus remained as before, igno- 
rant, superstitious, and politically apathetic. Upon 
the cultured classes, on the other hand, Peter's 
reforms exerted an enormous stimulus, arousing 
in susceptible minds not only the desire for indi- 
vidual perfection, but the ambition for such a 
degree of national progress, intellectual, political, 
and religious, as had never before been dreamt 
of. Hence it was that since the reformer's time 
these two classes had been growing farther and 
farther apart, — here, a small, highly cultured class, 
boundless in its aspirations, and eager to secure 
for Russia, in opportunities for the individual, as 



REVOLT OF THE "DECEMBRISTS" 117 

well as institutions for the nation, every conceiv- 
able possibility of welfare, yet rendered politically 
powerless for good by mere lack of numbers ; 
there, a class uncultured and unprogressive, sev- 
ered from contact with the higher thought of the 
world, yet dowered, by virtue of overwhelming 
numbers alone, with the power to determine that 
all the people in Russia, cultured as well as igno- 
rant, should live under an absolute, an autocratic 
system. That sooner or later revolt should come 
against the power of an uneducated and incom- 
petent majority to subject a cultured and politi- 
cally qualified minority to a despotic form of gov- 
ernment was inevitable. And so, out of the 
tragedy of the situation, with its deeply-lying 
antagonisms of interest, there was gradually ma- 
tured what has come to be known as the Russian 
revolutionary movement. 

Already, in the time of Alexander, the protest 
had been prepared. Reading had thoroughly 
familiarized the cultured class with the political 
conditions of western Europe. By travel, espe- 
cially, numerous army officers had gained glimpses 
of the happier conditions prevailing in countries 
constitutionally governed. And when the Napo- 
leonic campaigns were over, — when, after being 
marched from the monotonous plains of eastern 
Europe into the verdure-clad heights and valleys 



118 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

of Switzerland, Italy, and France, the armies of 
Kussia finally returned home, they could not fail 
to display the mental quickening they had them- 
selves undergone, or to carry to their fellow- 
countrymen the impulse of the new ideas, the 
fresh hopes, and daring aspirations awakened in 
their own minds by the brilliant civilization of the 
West. 

The secret societies now began to move. The 
scheme of such organizations as the Society of 
Virtue, the Society of the North, the Society of 
the South, and the Society of the United Slavs, 
was the introduction into Russia of a federative 
type of constitutional government which should 
unite in a single republic the various Slav coun- 
tries, Poland included. Serfdom was to be abol- 
ished, and various reforms, judicial, industrial, and 
social, carried into effect. The unexpected death 
of Alexander I. made his assassination unneces- 
sary. The conspirators utilized in favor of their 
plot a peculiar uncertainty regarding the succession. 
The Grand Duke Constantine, eldest son of the 
dead monarch, after marrying the Princess Lowicz, 
a Pole, had renounced the throne in favor of 
his younger brother Nicholas. Pestel, pretending 
that Nicholas was a usurper, had no difficulty 
in persuading the soldiers to revolt. The rising, 
which took place on the morning of December 



REVOLT OF THE "DECEMBRISTS" 119 

26, spent its force id the Square of the Senate. 
A few discharges of grapeshot sufficed to scatter 
the insurgents. About five hundred were taken 
prisoners ; the rest surrendered. It was in the 
quelling of this outbreak of the "Decembrists," 
as they were called, as well as of a less serious one 
iu the south of Russia, that Nicholas — who had 
himself directed the gunners — gave to the revo- 
lutionary movement its first martyrs, ■ — Pestel, 
Ryleyev, Bestuzhev-Ryumin, MuravyeV-Apostol, 
and Kakhovsky, all of whom were executed, one of 
them so clumsily and cruelly as to provoke the 
comment from the victim that in Russia they did 
not even know how to hang a man. 

Nicholas afterwards declared that if he had only 
an hour to live, he was determined to be Em- 
peror of Russia for that hour. It was in this temper 
that a monarch, fitted by appearance as well as by 
character for autocratic rule, had quelled the effort 
to revolutionize Russia. Robust in physique, 
much over the ordinary stature, inured to fatigue, 
and alert in all his movements, Nicholas I. had 
the hard, stern features of a man who felt in him- 
self the "divine right" of kings, and was resolved 
to assert that right. And it was with the prestige 
of his victory over the forces of disaffection that, 
having disposed of the revolutionists, though not 
of the revolutionary movement, he proceeded to 



120 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

take up the cares of government. The prepara- 
tion and issue of a new criminal code ; the creation 
of a new citizen class enjoying various privileges 
and exemptions; the partial restoration of the 
custom of entail ; the abolition of the pravezh 
(custom of flogging for debt) in the territory of 
the Don Cossacks, and the construction of the 
railway from Moscow to St. Petersburg, — the 
order for which the monarch is said to have given 
by drawing a straight line between the two cities 
on a map, — these were the measures which formed 
the most considerable achievements of his home 
policy. During his reign of thirty years, Eussia 
was several times at war, — once with Persia and 
twice with Turkey. The result of the first struggle 
with the Porte was to compel Turkey to recog- 
nize the independence of Greece, to cede territory 
to Russia in both Europe and Asia, to open the 
Bosphorus and Dardanelles to general commerce, 
and to grant to Russia complete freedom of navi- 
gation in the Black Sea. The interval between 
the first and second conflict with Turkey brought 
the Polish insurrection of 1830-31. The standard 
of revolt was raised on the evening of November 
29, 1830, by two young officers, Wysocki and 
Zaliwski. Led successively by Chlopicki, Radzi- 
wil, Skrzynecki, Dembinski, Malachovski, Kruko- 
wiecki, and Niemoievski, the Poles, forsaken by 



REVOLT OF THE "DECEMBRISTS" 121 

Europe, fought heroically but unavailingly. The 
single victories they won could not disguise the 
fact that they were outnumbered ; and when Pas- 
kie*vich poured across the frontier with reinforce- 
ments, two days' bombardment of Warsaw sufficed 
to crush the patriots (Sept. 6-7, 1831). Then 
began the reprisals. The conspirators who pos- 
sessed anything had their property confiscated. 
The poorer insurrectionists were committed to 
prison, or banished. Worse still, the constitution 
granted to Poland by Alexander I. disappeared, 
and was never again heard of. Five Russian gov- 
ernments took the place of the old Polish palati- 
nates. Simultaneously, the religious union in the 
southwest, comprising Lithuania and White Russia, 
was abolished, and the Uniat clergy received into 
the Orthodox Russo-Greek Church. 

Nicholas was won over, by instinct as well as by 
experience, to the policy of the " alliance of kings 
against peoples ; " and when, in 1849, Austria gave 
him the opportunity to declare himself anew, he 
did not hesitate to send his legions against the 
little band of patriotic Hungarians gathered around 
Kossuth, who were struggling for Magyar liberty. 
This intervention in behalf of Austrian despotism, 
paid for by the Russian people with a deficit of 
30,000,000 rubles, was the beginning of the end 
so far as the military prestige of Nicholas was 



122 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

concerned. A few years later the " iron emperor " 
was compelled to expiate his assaults upon liberal 
thought and popular freedom in the disaster of the 
Crimean war. The reaction which followed — 
its force, its spontaneity, and its utter disregard of 
consequences — contains a promise for the future 
of Russia whose significance cannot easily be 
overestimated. For the universal dissatisfaction 
at once broke forth in a movement the like of 
which, before or since, has never been known in 
Eussia. The corrupt administration of years was 
now called up for judgment; pen and tongue, 
breaking through the prohibitions of the press 
laws, joined in wholesale denunciation of Nicholas 
and his ministers. The strong-willed, obstinate 
monarch died in the midst of the outburst (March 
2, 1855), and left his son, Alexander II., not 
only to make peace with the allies, but to initiate 
that policy of reform in Russia which could no 
longer be denied even by an autocratic regime. 



VII 

EMANCIPATION OF THE PEASANTS 

The new Emperor was thirty-seven years old 
when, with a sense of grave responsibility, he took 
up the burden of the earlier defeats in the Crimea. 
To the cares of his position he brought the thought- 
ful habits acquired during a careful course of train- 
ing, as well as a plan of action not wholly uninspired 
by the humanitarian ideas of his time. Slender 
in physique and somewhat above middle height, 
he also had features which might fairly be called 
handsome. Russia looked to the new monarch for 
prompt action ; and Alexander II. (1855-81) be- 
gan a reign of which the first half was to be liberal 
and the second reactionary, with an effort to stem 
the tide of disaster in the south. But Sebastopol, 
thundered at with 874 cannon, had already fallen 
(Sept. 8, 1855), and nothing remained but to make 
the most favorable terms that could be secured. 
At the Congress of Paris, opened in Feb., 1856, 
a treaty was signed by which, in addition to other 
concessions, Russia lost her former domination of 



124 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

the Black Sea (neutralized) and gave up her pro- 
tectorate over the Christian principalities of the 
Danube. Her foreign policies, now committed to 
Prince GortschakofP, continued for many years to 
reflect the caution produced by the disaster in the 
Crimea. Pledged to hold herself in reserve — to 
se recueillir — Russia seemed now to avoid foreign 
interventions as much as she had formerly coveted 
them. Yet when the opportunity came for retriev- 
ing the situation created by the Treaty of Paris, 
she acted with promptness and spirit. Thus, in 
1871, at the Conference of London, she succeeded 
in her effort to cancel that clause of the Paris 
Treaty by which the Black Sea had been neutral- 
ized. In September, 1876, Russia entered with 
Germany into the Alliance of the Three Emperors. 
Intervening the following year on behalf of the 
maltreated populations under Turkish rule on the 
Danube, the Tsar declared war upon the Sultan, 
and after a victorious campaign in both Europe 
and Asia imposed upon Turkey the Treaty of 
San Stefano (March 3, 1878), by which Servia 
and Roumania were made independent and the 
rest of the Turkish territories of the Danube 
brought under Russian influence. The European 
powers then intervened, and the Treaty of San 
Stefano was profoundly modified by the Treaty of 
Berlin (July 13, 1878). 



EMANCIPATION OF THE PEASANTS 125 

It was while these events were readjusting the 
relation of Russia to foreign countries that policies 
of the utmost importance to the national civiliza- 
tion were being worked out at home. Of these 
perhaps the most significant was the liberation of 
the agriculturists of Russia from their forced con- 
nection with the land they cultivated. The defeat 
in the Crimea had proved a blessing in disguise. 
It carried into the reign of Alexander II. the agi- 
tation previously begun for the emancipation of 
the serfs, and brought on other changes of vital 
importance for the welfare of the people. Human 
slavery in Russia was instituted about the middle 
of the seventeenth century as a means — at a time 
when the state, as well as the landlords, had begun 
to suffer seriously from the migratory habits of 
the peasants — of securing to the land the forces 
necessary to its cultivation. The legal enactment 
which definitely fixed the peasant to the soil 
was the decree of 1648 (reign of Alexei Mikhai- 
lovich). Serfdom, confirmed and reaffirmed by 
subsequent decrees, thereafter took its place in the 
social fabric as a legalized institution. Not only 
did the serfs grow in number : they came to form 
the chief source of income, as well of the land- 
owning class, properly so called, as of the Rus- 
sian monasteries, one of which — the famous Troit- 
sky — had been the first of the slave proprietors 



126 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

to benefit by the prohibitive legislation. In time, 
moreover, serfdom was extended to regions in 
which it had never existed. Under Catherine the 
Great, for example, the institution was not only 
reintroduced into Little-Russia, where Bogdan 
Khmelnitsky had abolished it, but was carried 
into the Ukraine, now the government of Khar- 
kov (1788). A few years later the right of 
free removal was taken from the Don Cossacks, 
as well as from the peasants of the southern gov- 
ernments known as New Russia. The multiplica- 
tion of serfs was also aided in the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries by the custom in which the 
monarchs of Russia made to their ministers and 
favorites gifts of crown lands, the peasants on 
which, though practically free, became common 
serfs through the transfer. In the reign of Cath- 
erine II. the slave population of Russia was thus 
increased by 800,000, and in the reign of Paul I. 
by 600,000. 

For a time serfdom served its purpose; then 
the evils of the institution developed with rapidity. 
The class which the government had degraded 
into a mere machine for the raising of taxes soon 
showed that it could be a menace as well as a help 
to the state. How many dissatisfied peasants took 
part in the insurrections led by Stenko Razyn 
and Pugackev in the seventeenth and eighteenth 



EMANCIPATION OF THE PEASANTS 127 

centuries will never be known. Of the economic 
disadvantages of the system, it is enough to say 
that the profits of keeping serfs grew less and less^ 
and that when the closing days of the institution 
were reached, it was found that two thirds of the 
serfs held as property had been mortgaged by 
their proprietors to the credit establishments of 
the state. But the most powerful objection of all 
was made to serfdom as a moral evil. The asser- 
tion of the doctrine that " man may hold property 
in man," so vigorously challenged by Brougham 
in England, had led in Russia to numberless 
abuses. A slave, if unruly, could be sent by his 
owner to Siberia for life. If he dared to make 
complaints, he could be knuted and deported 
to the mines. Sometimes charges were brought 
against peasants merely for the purpose of separat- 
ing them from their wives. In the worst period 
of serfdom the agriculturist was compelled to do 
forced work on the lands of the proprietor, as well 
as to submit to numerous other exactions. 

That serfdom was an evil had been early recog- 
nized in Russia, and the recognition came even 
before the institution had been denounced in no 
unmeasured terms by the Encyclopedists of France. 
Yet the Russian writers who ventured to attack it 
fared badly even in the days of such a humanita- 
rian as Catherine the Great. The first formal 



128 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

proposal for its abolition came from the litterateur 
Alexander Nikolayevich Radishchev in the form 
of a volume entitled " A Journey from St. Peters- 
burg to Moscow," published in 1790. Eagerly 
read for a while by the educated classes, the book 
was thereupon suppressed by the authorities, the 
Empress herself being the severest of its crit- 
ics. As for Radishchev, he was summoned before 
the Senate and condemned to death, — a fate which 
he escaped, as we have seen, only through Cather- 
ine (who had perused his book in the deepest indig- 
nation) taking it into her head to commute the 
sentence to deportation to the mines for life, with 
the loss of all civil rights. 1 After Radishchev, the 
subject slumbered for a while. But it was again 
heard of in the reign of Paul, who issued a decree 
ordaining that the peasants should not be com- 
pelled to work for their masters more than three 
days in every week. Alexander I. struck a blow 
at the abuses of deportation by ordaining (1822) 
that every married woman whose husband was con- 
demned to exile should have the privilege of accom- 
panying him into banishment with all her children. 

1 Radishchev was amnestied by the Emperor Paul and finally 
called to St. Petersburg 1 in 1801, to take part in the work of a 
legislative commission as one of its members. He committed 
suicide in 1802, under the mistaken impression that he was to be 
returned to Siberia. 



EMANCIPATION OF THE PEASANTS 129 

Yet as the mass of the peasants remained in 
ignorance of the law, it became necessary in the 
following reign to pass legislation (1834) order- 
ing the judge to ask the wife of every man con- 
demned to deportation if she wished to take advan- 
tage of the law, with the result that in the great 
majority of cases the women elected to share in 
the exile of their husbands. 

Meanwhile, the sentiment in favor of eman- 
cipating the peasants had matured into a definite 
policy. Alexander I. showed his personal attitude 
towards the reform, not only by renouncing his 
right to make gifts of crown lands containing serfs, 
but also by establishing a fund for the purchase of 
slave estates with a view to the emancipation of 
their slaves, as well as by issuing decrees legaliz- 
ing contracts of manumission agreed to between 
serfs and their masters. It was in the reign of 
this monarch, moreover, that the first practical 
experiment with emancipation was made by a 
scheme, which the Emperor sanctioned, for liber- 
ating, in a period of fourteen years, the Lett and 
Chud serf peasants of the three Baltic provinces 
of Esthonia, Kurland, and Livonia. That the edu- 
cated classes were profoundly interested in the 
cause of emancipation is sufficiently shown by 
the fact that the Decembrists, Russia's first revo- 
lutionary party, inscribed this reform on their 



130 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

programme as one of its leading features. Nicho* 
las himself strongly favored the reform, and used 
to say in conversation, " I do not understand how 
a man can become a thing. I cannot explain it 
save by attributing it to cunning on the one side 
and ignorance on the other." In 1847 the famous 
critic Belinsky was able to send word to a friend 
that Nicholas had definitely decided to take 
measures for the abolition of serfdom. But this 
monarch, after placing the matter in the hands of 
a committee, died before his wishes could be 
realized. 

By this time powerful, though indirect, advocacy 
in the Russian press was having its effect upon the 
nation. Most effective, as an influence hostile to 
serfdom, were the writings of Gogol, the novelist, 
who familiarized his countrymen with its abuses 
in his sketches of country life. His famous 
" Dead Souls " (1842), revealing how wantonly 
human slaves with white faces could be bought 
and trafficked in like chattels, created a sensa- 
tion. But the severest criticism of serfdom as an 
institution came in TourguenefPs "Annals of a 
Sportsman," produced by one who, by the force 
of his artistic power and deep human sympathies 
— without passion, argument, or polemic — roused 
Russia as with a shock to the moral degradation 
of slavery. The irritated government, which 



EMANCIPATION OF THE PEASANTS 131 

might have borne the " Annals "asa literary pro- 
duction, found its effect upon the nation intolerable ; 
and so, when Tourgueneff proceeded to disclose a 
still larger part of his mind in a letter on the death 
of Gogol (published in the " Moskovskiya Vyedo- 
mosti," 1852), it ordered the famous author into a 
month's arrest, after which he was interned for 
two years in the village of Spasskoe. Among the 
publicists whose writings helped to create a public 
opinion against serfdom, the best known was per- 
haps Chernishevsky, who contributed articles on eco- 
nomics and other subjects to the " Sovremennik." 
The fateful year 1855 was now reached : it was 
in this year that Nicholas was summoned to vacate 
the throne to which, nearly thirty years before, 
he had fought his way with grapeshot through the 
ranks of the revolting Decembrists ; that news came 
of the crushing defeat inflicted upon Eussian arms 
by the allies in the Crimean Peninsula ; and that, 
stung by the sense of national humiliation, the 
nation broke through all bounds, and for once, as 
never before in Eussia, exercised the right of free 
speech on behalf of reform. Nor was it only that 
the new government had to reckon with the de- 
mands which were being freely formulated at 
home. From the free Eussian printing office 
founded in London in 1854, the exiled litterateur 
Herzen, thundering for years against the adminis- 



132 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

trative abuses of his native land, probably did 
more than any other publicist then living to force 
on the issue of emancipation. 

It has been held that, by the action of slave- 
owners themselves, who were continually manu- 
mitting their serfs; by the operation of the law 
which made every soldier a free man ; and by the 
effect of arrangements through which the fore- 
closure of mortgages by the state converted ordi- 
nary serfs into free crown peasants — serfdom 
would have finally passed away of itself as an in- 
stitution. But the rulers of Russia wisely pre- 
ferred to bring it to an end by legislation ; and the 
honor of doing this belongs to Alexander II., and 
to such statesmen and publicists as Yury Samarin, 
N. A. Milyiitin, Prince V. A. Cherkassky, Pro- 
fessor Kavelin, and others who were his zealous 
and talented assistants in the work. After much 
preparatory labor in committees, emancipation 
was finally accomplished by the Act of March 3, 
1861. It was this act which enabled the peasant, 
while remaining a member of the self-governing 
body known as the mir, or commune, to acquire 
by purchase the land which, up till then, he had 
cultivated only as a serf. In order to facilitate the 
purchase of the land, which could be made either 
by the whole commune or by the individual house- 
holders, the government made advances to the 



EMANCIPATION OF THE PEASANTS 133 

peasants (of amounts equal to four fifths of the 
capitalized purchase price) to enable them to ac- 
quire the land they occupied, under an arrange- 
ment which permitted them, by means of three 
years' rent paid down, and then by a six per cent 
payment covering interest, to extinguish their debt 
in forty-nine years. On these terms being ac- 
cepted, the relations of the peasants with their 
landlords ceased, and the payments due were 
henceforward made to the government. The ad- 
ministration also aided the landlords, who received 
government scrip on which interest, along with the 
redemption money, was payable. It was at first 
only optional for owners and peasants to avail 
themselves of the redemption arrangements, but in 
the reign of Alexander III. (1883) it became 
necessary to make land redemption compulsory. 
Under the Emancipation Act, 21,625,609 peas- 
ants, or about one half the total number in the 
empire, were in this way set free. The crown 
peasants, already practically free, and therefore 
not affected by the act, numbered over 22,000,000 ; 
and to these must be added 2,000,000 appanage 
peasants on estates reserved for the endowment of 
the imperial family. In 1866 the peasants on the 
crown lands were also permitted by decree to re- 
deem the land they cultivated under the conditions 
just described. The domestic serfs, numbering 



134 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

1,500,000, received their freedom in two years 
after the passing of the act of 1861, but without 
any privilege of acquired land. 

It was in connection with the Emancipation Act 
that the characteristically Russian and purely 
democratic institution of the mir was reemphasized, 
as it were, by legislation which fixed the status of 
the peasant as a member of the self-governing 
commune. The country remained, as before, di- 
vided into volosti, or cantons, with villages for 
their administrative centres. The officers of volost 
and village alike are chosen by universal suffrage, 
the right to vote being conferred upon all the 
grown-up men in the community. But the repre- 
sentation is of houses or " fires ; " and women who 
have temporarily lost their husbands are admitted 
to the deliberations. At the assemblies — gener- 
ally held on Sundays after mass in the open air — 
the peasants vote on various matters affecting the 
interests of the commune, such as the amount of 
taxes to be levied upon each household, the re- 
allotment of the land held in common by the vil- 
lage, and the transfer of collective land to the 
status of private property. The officers of the 
mir, presided over by an elder, usually receive pay 
for their services. An important feature of the 
Emancipation Act was that it freed the peasants 
from their subservience to the land-owning class. 



EMANCIPATION OF THE PEASANTS 135 

The news of emancipation was first given to 
the public at St. Petersburg, where the imperial 
manifesto was read from the altar in the vari- 
ous churches. Dzhanshiev tells us that it was 
" listened to in complete silence, and even with 
some feeling of consternation. . . . The intelli- 
gent classes were disagreeably impressed with the 
cold and formal tone of the proclamation. Only 
when the reader came to the sentence 'Make the 
sign of the cross, thou Orthodox people, and along 
with us, ask for the blessing of God upon thy free 
labor, the guarantee of thy domestic well-being 
and of the public welfare,' — only here did the 
manifesto produce an impression, for here every- 
one present impulsively made the sign of the 
cross." 1 A more lively demonstration was wit- 
nessed at the Manezh in St. Petersburg, the Tsar 
himself being present, for though the people were 
too much afraid of the police to give expression to 
the feelings excited in them by the reading of the 
decree, they vigorously cheered the Emperor. The 
emancipation manifesto was afterwards promul- 
gated all over Eussia, the official announcement of 
it being made on different days in the various cities 
of the empire, and being there accompanied by 
illuminations, entertainments, etc. In many a 

1 Epokha Vdikikh Reform (Epoch of the Great Reforms), Mos- 
cow, 1898. 



136 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

hamlet and straggling village the news was the 
signal for popular rejoicing; to many a private 
dwelling it brought the sudden emotion which 
could find relief only in tears. Yet there were 
none the less remote rural districts where it 
plunged the peasants in a whirl of perplexity and 
misunderstanding, the outcome of which, in one or 
two cases, was riots which had to be suppressed 
by force. 

Nor did the reforms of Alexander II. end 
with the emancipation of the serfs. His mani- 
festo abolishing slavery in Kussia was no isolated 
incident in the progress of Russian culture, but 
rather part of a great tide of feeling which, carry- 
ing the monarch along with it, led to other reforms 
of high social utility. The conceptions of justice 
and equality which hitherto only radicals and rev- 
olutionists had dared to embody in their pro- 
grammes were now made the subject of legislative 
enactments emanating from the government itself. 
Following upon the measure which freed the peas- 
ants came as its complement a series of radical 
administrative reforms by which the people ob- 
tained a considerable measure of self-government. 
By the law of January, 1864, elective bodies 
called zemstva, or provincial assemblies, were 
established in various governments of the empire. 
Meanwhile the former rule of the squires, or landed 



EMANCIPATION OF THE PEASANTS 137 

gentry, was abolished, a system being substituted 
which gave representation to the whole land-own- 
ing class, private ownership and communal owner- 
ship included. Hitherto the judiciary and police 
administration had been in the hands of officials 
chosen exclusively by the nobility. In place of 
ignorant magistrates, trained legal experts were 
elected to judicial positions, at the same time that 
the people were admitted, as jurors, to participa- 
tion in the administration of justice. The public 
education of the country also underwent improve- 
ment. In 1863 the universities were declared 
independent ; in 1864 " real " schools, introducing 
German educational ideas, were added to the 
classical schools of the empire. Special provision 
was also made for the education of women. 

We shall see later something of the reaction 
which came from the generous temper that inspired 
the Emancipation Act. In some directions, never- 
theless, the effect of the decree was lasting and, 
on the whole, beneficial. Its moral value has 
never been seriously disputed. The economical 
results secured by the measure are unquestionable. 
By removing the artificial conditions which placed 
an immense body of unpaid labor at the disposal 
of agriculture, emancipation forced the landlords 
to a degree of effort and enterprise the necessity 
of which they had never felt during serfdom. By 



138 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

throwing the land open to free purchase, the act 
removed the temptation to spend upon unproductive 
or poorly productive lands the capital which should 
be devoted to other forms of industry, at the same 
time that it operated to advance Russia from the 
stage of ownership by the commune to the stage 
of private ownership. Simultaneously with these 
changes, and also partly as a consequence of them, 
the abolition of serfdom contributed powerfully to 
the development of the long-neglected urban life 
of Russia : a portion, at least, of the liberated serfs 
thenceforward gave their labor to the development 
of the cities. Besides, moreover, enabling the 
peasant to purchase the land he cultivated, the 
imperial decree liberated him from forced labor. 
Serfdom in Russia, as in other parts of Europe, 
had involved various forms of bondage and in- 
debtedness to the land-owning classes. The en- 
slaved peasant had to give work to his manorial 
lord in the form of the so-called bdrshchina, or 
settle his obligation by the obrok, or money pay- 
ment. When the bond was one of labor, it in- 
volved three days' toil every week on the lands 
and in the interest of the proprietor ; and it was 
this form of obligation which the Emancipation 
Act did away with entirely. 

This brief period of reform has been described 
as the golden age of liberalism in Russia. It was 



EMANCIPATION OF THE PEASANTS 139 

not only greeted with universal satisfaction: it 
raised the expectations of the educated classes to 
the highest pitch. Yet in the very midst of it 
movements were maturing destined to bring on 
reaction in its severest forms. One of these had 
its origin in the discontent of the Poles, who, anti- 
cipating the early resuscitation of their country as 
an independent power, had received the Eussian 
concessions of Alexander II. as a promise of their 
own speedy deliverance from the painful conditions 
imposed after their rebellion in the reign of Nicho- 
las. The effort of the authorities in Warsaw to 
obtain military recruits by force, after the people 
had been several times fired upon while celebrating 
patriotic holidays, precipitated a new insurrec- 
tion (January 15, 1863) in which the Poles, 
weaker than ever, could maintain little more than 
a guerilla warfare against the disciplined troops 
under Muraviev. The revolt, suppressed with 
great ferocity, resulted in the complete destruction 
of the remnants of Polish autonomy. The Rus- 
sian language took the place of Polish in public 
documents, while the system of Polish education 
was remodeled on the basis of the Eussian univer- 
sity system. Moreover, such Eussian reforms as 
trial by jury, the institution of provincial assem- 
blies, and the improved judicial system, were 
expressly withheld from the Poles. 



VIII 

"nihilism" and the revolutionary move- 
ment 

Having disposed of the revolt in Poland, the 
government of Alexander II. was now free to deal 
with the much more formidable problem of Rus- 
sian disaffection. This disaffection was already- 
beginning to take the form which has since become 
widely known as the " Nihilist movement." The 
term "Nihilism," as used by Tourgu6nefi° in 
"Fathers and Children," was originally applied 
to an intellectual attitude or school of thought. 
The educated youth of Russia, after coquetting 
awhile with the philosophy of Schelling and Hegel, 
had finally come under the influence of the eco- 
nomic radicals of France, such as Louis Blanc 
and Proudhon, still later of the writings of Buckle, 
Buchner, Moleschott, and Darwin. This contact 
with the German and English nature philosophers 
led in the fifties and sixties to the individualist, 
otherwise " Nihilist " movement, and through that 
movement to a revolt of the cultured classes of 
Russia against the whole fabric of ideas on which 



"NIHILISM" 141 

the state religion and the system of government 
rested in Russia. "Nihilism " was at first simply 
the intellectual attitude of this revolt. The " Ni- 
hilists," in other words, were the bolder spirits of 
the age who, believing that the time for acqui- 
escing in everything was at an end, had begun to 
question and challenge everything. Nothing in 
custom or tradition escaped their destructive criti- 
cism ; against ideas and institutions based merely 
on social habit or authority they rebelled with 
all their might. Even harmless conventionalisms 
of thought and conduct were placed under the 
ban by men and women who sought, not only to 
improve the political and religious institutions of 
Russia, but also to emancipate themselves as indi- 
viduals from every obstacle to a healthy moral life. 
The " Nihilists," as Emerson might have said, 
were people who, in an age preeminently false, 
wished to stand in true relations with men, and 
were willing to do this at the risk of much misun- 
derstanding and of an occasional " fit of insanity." 
The misunderstanding came in due course, nor 
was the appearance of mental aberration withheld 
from the movement. Young people of both sexes 
there were who, by their exaggerations of speech and 
dress, perhaps also of conduct, travestied it to the 
point of folly. The agitation even suffered from 
the action of men who, like Bakunin, the anarchist, 



142 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

ignored its constructive quality and made " Nihi- 
lism " the synonym for universal destruction. 
And so in the end, those interested in discrediting 
the movement for political reform in Russia were 
able, by calling the reformers " Nihilists," to misre- 
present them as people who wished to destroy the 
foundations of all civilized life. 

How far the church and the state in Russia 
were from being ideally perfect institutions may 
be gathered from the condition of the family, which 
the individualist movement did so much to elevate. 
When the new ideas began to enter Russia in the 
forties and fifties, the female sex in Russia, so far 
as the masses of the people were concerned, was 
still living under the conditions prescribed by the 
church customs of Byzantine Christianity. From 
the earliest period of Russian history woman had 
been treated as a minor, and kept under the per- 
petual tutelage of some male relative invested with 
patriarchal authority over her comings and goings. 
Confined to the terem, otherwise called verkh, or 
" upper room," she was carefully isolated from 
intercourse with strangers. As a wife, she was 
the slave, literally the property, of her husband. 
Not only was he permitted to chastise her: the 
Domostroy, a code of church rules regulating the 
family life of the people, enjoined him to do so 
whenever the wife neglected her duty. It even 



"NIHILISM" 143 

enumerated cases in which the wife as well as the 
children could be beaten with the lash, the punish- 
ment with this instrument being described as 
" reasonable and painful, terrible and yet benefi- 
cial. If the fault is great, the chastisement must 
be more severe ; while, if the wife does not show 
any regret, a still severer punishment must be in- 
flicted." Meanwhile every precaution, as enjoined 
by the Domostroy, was taken to confine the wo- 
man strictly to her household duties, and to pre- 
vent her from acquiring any but the simplest 
household arts. No wonder that Kotoshikhin 
should write that " the female sex does not know 
how to read or write," and that while " not lack- 
ing natural judgment, they are simply without 
ideas and shy, since from childhood they live in 
the seclusion of the terem, and only see their rela- 
tives." Nor did the reforms of Peter the Great 
relieve women altogether from the tyranny of the 
patriarchal system. Even in modern Eussia the 
rigor of parental authority was still exerted in the 
household ; the young girls continued to have their 
husbands chosen for them ; the mournful song of 
the young wife married against her will, and ill- 
treated by her tyrannical mother-in-law, survived 
into the nineteenth century like the echo of a 
plaint which in its full sadness and despair belonged 
properly to the fifteenth. 



144 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

It was the new ideas, first reaching the dwellers 
of the cities, and only gradually permeating to the 
country districts, which aroused the more enter- 
prising minds as from a sleep of centuries. One of 
the earliest results of the awakening was a demand 
for higher education which could not be satisfied 
by the schools then in existence. New colleges, 
together with special " courses," were opened by 
the government, and to these the young women 
and men hastened from all parts of Eussia. The 
result was to crowd the university towns with the 
intellectually active of both sexes. It was here — 
despite the government prohibition of public meet- 
ings — that the educated youth of Russia met to 
discuss, in the boldest way, the most fundamental 
questions of religion, society, and national admin- 
istration. And it was in the ferment of this dis- 
cussion that the new Eussia of the sixties broke 
forever with the old Eussia of the Domostroy and 
the national church. The bonds of the patriarchal 
system were now cast off along with the religious 
beliefs under whose authority they had been so 
long maintained. Not only did the women, reject- 
ing parental tyranny, assert their freedom in matters 
of the heart — they claimed the right to enter the 
professions hitherto open only to men. Hence it 
came about that, besides having a " woman's ques- 
tion " on its hands, Eussia soon witnessed the 



"NIHILISM" 145 

influx of women into various professional occupa- 
tions, as journalists, teachers, doctors, nurses, etc. 

The time had now come for the reformers, under 
the stress of modern conditions, and with such 
means as they could command, to take up once 
more the cause championed by the Decembrists 
in the days of Nicholas. The people, it must be 
remembered, were still burdened with a political 
system which denied them the commonest political 
rights; with administrative police methods under 
which men and women could be exiled or otherwise 
punished without the slightest form of trial ; and 
with a censorship by means of which the activities 
of the press could be suspended or prohibited alto- 
gether for " offenses " not recognized as such in the 
countries of western Europe. Besides these general 
grievances, the cultured and student classes had 
wrongs of their own. Perhaps the most important 
of them were the obstacles thrown in the way of 
their education by the government itself. Finding 
that the colleges and universities were developing 
forms of liberal thought hostile to its methods, the 
administration made an effort to suppress these 
tendencies by imposing restrictions and penalties 
upon the " offenders." It disciplined the broad- 
minded professor by dismissing him from his posi- 
tion ; it either harassed the student by a system 
of espionage and excessive " regulation " within 



146 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

the university, or it gave power to the rector to 
dismiss him before he had earned the diploma on 
which he counted to make his way in the world. 
The individuals thus deprived of a career naturally 
went to swell the ranks of the disaffected, and 
there were thus added to the forces of the revolu- 
tionary movement men who had a personal as well 
as a political interest in conspiring against auto- 
cratic government in Russia. 

Meanwhile the emancipation of the peasants in 
1861 had given an immense stimulus to the de- 
mand for participation of the people in the task 
of national administration. Popular feeling on 
the subject was shown by the action of the assem- 
blies of nobility in Moscow, Smolensk, and Tver, 
who had at once petitioned for a constitution. 
A year later a body calling itself the "Central 
Revolutionary Committee " issued a proclamation 
declaring that the blood of the Romanovs must 
answer for the wretchedness of the people. The 
government thereupon seized the pretext of some 
extensive incendiary fires in St. Petersburg to 
close all the clubs and societies at which the dis- 
contented classes had been accustomed to assemble. 
In Kazan the members of a revolutionary society 
were punished with imprisonment, exile, or death 
— five being shot or hanged — for having issued 
appeals to the people. On April 16, 1866, Kara- 



"NIHILISM" 147 

kasov, the delegate of a revolutionary club, fired 
at the Emperor as he was leaving the Summer 
Garden, but missed his aim owing to the promp- 
titude of a peasant. Reactionary government 
measures were at once taken, among them being a 
complete reorganization of the educational estab- 
lishments with a view to rooting out disaffection at 
its source. In the belief that the prevailing dis- 
content was due to science — to the independence 
of thought fostered by scientific studies — the new 
minister of public education, Count Dmitry A. 
Tolstoy, introduced an educational programme in 
which the chief emphasis was laid upon Greek and 
Latin, to the almost complete exclusion of the 
natural sciences. The dislike of the Russian mind 
for the classics — its tendency to scientific realism 
— made the new programme odious, rendered 
Tolstoy exceedingly unpopular, and within the col- 
leges and universities fostered the very discontent 
which it was the object of the new policy to 
remove. 

The organizing of conspiracies, such as that of 
Nechayev, broken up by the police in 1869, occu- 
pied the next few years. Finally, at the begin- 
ning of the seventies, recognizing the disinclination 
of the peasants to take part in the movement 
against authority, the revolutionists determined to 
give themselves to the task of educating and or- 



148 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS . 

ganizing the masses of the people. There was 
something naive in the supposition that the whole 
mental tendencies of millions of peasants, scat- 
tered over an empire of enormous extent, could be 
radically changed in a few years of propaganda by 
a few thousand propagandists ; yet once the de- 
cision had been taken, the plan of " going to the 
people " was promptly put into practice, and from 
1872 to 1875 there went on in European Eussia a 
movement such as was never heard of anywhere 
else, and could have been possible in no other 
country of the world. In all sorts of guises and 
disguises — as teachers, doctors, nurses, and as 
workmen and artisans — the pilgrims of the revo- 
lution left the cities for the country districts ; 
amid all sorts of personal hardships, as well as at 
great personal risk, they sought to inspire the 
people with revolutionary views. How incau- 
tiously they went to work is shown by the ease 
with which the government suppressed the move- 
ment. In three years, after many of the propa- 
gandists had been arrested and sentenced, the agi- 
tation was at an end. It had done little or nothing 
to weaken the loyalty of the peasants. All it had 
accomplished was to reveal the capacity of the 
Russian nature for self-sacrifice in the pursuit of 
ideal ends, and to suggest to the administration 
the wisdom of utilizing, in activities advantageous 



"NIHILISM" 149 

to the state, the energies which had thus been 
spent in the effort to arouse disaffection among the 
people. 

But the Eussian government, instead of taking 
the suggestion, proceeded to irritate the educated 
classes by sweeping measures of retaliation. The 
system of private denunciation, which placed 
people at the mercy of their personal enemies, and 
gave no opportunity of defense, was so widely 
extended as to subject its victims to imprisonment 
and exile on a mere suspicion of their " political 
infidelity." Under the operation of the adminis- 
trative system, which denied the right to a public 
accusation and trial, thousands of young people of 
both sexes were sent to Siberia for no other reason 
than because their names happened to be on the 
books of the police as politically disaffected. 
Even when charges were made, the most trivial 
" offenses " sufficed to send the accused to penal 
servitude in Siberia for a period of from ten to 
twelve years. It is therefore not much to be 
wondered at that the terrorism of the government 
should have so soon turned the revolutionists from 
the more peaceful forms of agitation into the path 
of open and unremitting violence. One of the 
first results of the new policy was the shooting 
of a number of police spies, whom the terrorists 
"executed" in various parts of Kussia between 



150 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

1876 and 1879. On February 5, 1878, a young 
woman, Viera Sasulich, fired at and wounded 
General Tre*pov, police prefect at St. Petersburg, 
for ordering a student named Bogolyubov to be 
flogged. As under the circumstances the punish- 
ment was illegal even according to Russian law, 
the sympathies of the Russian people were with 
Bogolyubov and the avenger of his wrong. The 
girl had herself suffered from the operation of the 
administrative system ; on being tried by a jury, 
she was at once acquitted. Outside the court 
room the police made an effort to re-arrest her, 
but the crowd saved her from capture, and she 
was enabled, not only to escape, but also to make 
her way across the frontier into western Europe. 

" Hunger strikes " now began in the Fortress of 
Peter and Paul at St. Petersburg, and in the Cen- 
tral Prison at Kharkov, undertaken by the " polit- 
icals " in both for the purpose of compelling 
better treatment of men at the hands of the prison 
authorities. On August 16, 1878, after Kavalsky 
had been shot at Odessa by order of a military 
tribunal, General Mesentsev, chief of the " Third 
Section," held responsible in popular opinion 
for the hunger strikes, was assassinated in the 
Nevsky Prospekt, at St. Petersburg. The govern- 
ment at once took from juries the purview of all 
political crimes, and henceforth provided for the 



"NIHILISM" 151 

trial of these cases by military tribunals. The 
first sensational incident of the following year, 
1879, was the shooting, by Goldenberg, of Prince 
Kropotkin, governor of Kharkov, for having ill- 
treated prisoners under his care. On April 14, 
an ex-teacher named Soloviev fired five shots at 
the Emperor without hitting him. The authori- 
ties now fell into a state of panic. The Tsar, 
besides appealing to the forces of society for sup- 
port, granted extraordinary powers to the police 
for the suppression of the terrorists. A system 
of national defense was intrusted to General 
Gourko at St. Petersburg, Loris Melikov at Khar- 
kov, and General Todtleben at Odessa. In St. 
Petersburg the house porters were charged with 
the duty of watching over domiciles and their in- 
mates in the function of detectives. During the 
panic, in the metropolis alone, some 60,000 per- 
sons were arrested and exiled by administrative 
process. 

In reply the revolutionists organized a conspir- 
acy whose immediate purpose was the slaying of 
the Emperor. Sentence of death was passed upon 
him by an " executive committee," and in Novem- 
ber, 1879, an effort was made to carry out the sen- 
tence on the occasion of the Tsar's return from the 
Crimea, by mining the railway at three points — 
Moscow, Odessa, and Alexandrovsk. All the at- 



152 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

tempts failed, the Moscow explosion, prepared by 
Hartmann, Sophia Perovskaya, Goldenberg, and 
others, taking effect on the wrong train. On Jan- 
uary 26, 1880, the " executive committee " in a 
formal declaration made a series of demands, — the 
right of free thought in religious matters, complete 
freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom 
of organization and of public meeting, the right of 
the people to be represented in the government, the 
right of universal suffrage, and several other re- 
forms. Three weeks later (February 17, 1880) an 
explosion was contrived in the Winter Palace by 
one Khalturin, who had obtained work in the 
building as a decorator ; but, owing to the late 
arrival of the guests, the Tsar again escaped in- 
jury. Yet the explosion did not occur without 
loss of life, since in the room below the dining- 
hall, and just above the place where the dynamite 
had been stored, some sixty guardsmen were killed 
and forty wounded. The " executive committee " 
at once issued a statement, regretting the useless 
loss of life, but announcing the purpose of the 
revolutionists to continue their struggle until the 
government granted a representative assembly. 

Loris Melikov was now made dictator, with spe- 
cial powers of dealing with the situation. Instead 
of devoting himself exclusively to the development 
of a policy of rigorous repression, Melikov, recog- 



"NIHILISM" 153 

nizing the need of obtaining for the administration 
the support of the people, set himself to the task 
of conciliating public opinion by concessions. A 
large number of exiles, banished for trivial offenses, 
were permitted to return from Siberia or from 
distant provinces ; dismissed employees were rein- 
stated; and some two thousand students were 
returned to their desks in the universities from 
which, for longer or shorter periods, they had been 
temporarily excluded. Meanwhile Melikov had 
drawn up a scheme for the calling of deputies 
together from the various local governing bodies, 
and had induced the Emperor to give it his con- 
sideration. This scheme, in the excitement of the 
time, was supposed to embody a plan for a national 
representative assembly ; yet it was really no more 
than a proposal to give the deputies summoned 
certain consultative functions in regard to projects 
of law. The Tsar, moreover, never gave his sanc- 
tion to the Melikov scheme — he did nothing more 
than arrange for its discussion by his council of 
ministers. This discussion was to have taken 
place on March 17, but the unfortunate Emperor 
did not live to take part in it. On the afternoon 
of March 13, 1881, he was fatally injured while 
passing in his carriage, accompanied by a few 
mounted Cossacks, along the Catherine Canal. 
Six conspirators awaited him there with bombs. 



154 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

The signal for the assassination was given by Sophia 
Perovskaya, a young girl of aristocratic family, 
daughter of the governor-general of St. Peters- 
burg. The first missile thrown merely shattered 
the carriage ; the second, launched by Grinevetsky 
(who was fatally wounded by the bomb), so in- 
jured the Emperor that he died soon after his 
arrival at the Winter Palace. A month later, 
after trial and condemnation before a military 
tribunal, the assassins — Zhelyabov, Perovskaya, 
Kibalchich, Mikhailov, and Eyssakov — were 
driven on tumbrils to the Simeonovsky Square, 
and hanged. In its proclamation to the new ruler, 
the " executive committee," which had authorized 
the assassination, renewed its demand for a rep- 
resentative assembly, and promised unconditional 
submission to any government which such an as- 
sembly might sanction. 

Alexander III., son of the " Tsar Liberator " 
(1881-94), — described by intimates as a man 
of powerful physique, great industry, but limited 
intellectual calibre, — took up without hesitation 
the reins of power wrested by revolutionary vio- 
lence from the hands of his father. He seemed at 
first disposed to carry out the arrangement for 
the discussion of the Melikov scheme ; but under 
the influence of conservative advisers, the pro- 
posals were finally " shelved." And when, on the 



"NIHILISM" 155 

occasion of the delayed coronation ceremony, the 
new Tsar was asked by the cultured classes, through 
Professor Chicherin, for a share in the work of 
national administration, the only reply vouchsafed 
was a new epoch of reaction, signalized by relent- 
less severity towards the press, by the formation of 
a " Holy League " designed to combat the machi- 
nations of the "Nihilists," and by a policy of 
centralization and nationalization in the course of 
which well-nigh every form of dissent in the empire 
was subjected to persecution. It was in this reign, 
moreover, that the autonomous government granted 
to the Baltic provinces by Peter the Great was 
completely broken up, in respect not only of its 
laws and customs, but also of its religion and lan- 
guage. Measures were meanwhile begun for the 
abolition of the constitution of Finland, and for 
the complete incorporation of the Grand Duchy 
into the Russian empire. 

The revolutionary movement had in the mean- 
while passed from the acute stage which it assumed 
towards the end of the seventies into those milder, 
though wider and deeper manifestations of dis- 
content which have since characterized the agita- 
tion. Yet its grievances and protests continued 
to challenge the attention of the civilized world. 
Thus in the spring of 1889, a party of political 
exiles were fired upon at Yakutsk by their guard, 



156 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

six of them being killed and nine dangerously 
wounded. In November of the same year, 
Madame Hope Sigida, a political prisoner con- 
fined at Kara, Siberia, was so unmercifully flogged 
by the prison authorities that she died two days 
afterwards. Two women in the same ward, on 
hearing of the flogging, poisoned themselves, and 
died in consequence. In 1890 a beautiful and 
accomplished young girl named Sophia Gunzburg, 
condemned to death for having taken part in the 
drawing up of a revolutionary proclamation, com- 
mitted suicide in a Russian prison. It was also 
in 1890 that a talented lady named Tsebrikova 
was punished with a period of exile for having, 
from a foreign country, forwarded to the Tsar a 
petition asking for reforms. 

The death of Alexander III., on November 1, 
1894, aroused much hope in the minds of the Rus- 
sian reformers, since his son and successor, Nich- 
olas II., who had already made one journey round 
the world, came to the throne with a reputation 
for liberal views apparently full of promise for the 
future of the Russian people. But the new ruler, 
though he began by dismissing the unpopular 
Gourko from the governor-generalship of Poland, 
did not justify the expectations which had been 
formed of him. And when the opportunity came 
to announce his attitude towards the question of a 



"NIHILISM" 157 

constitution for Russia, he did not hesitate to dash 
the hopes of those who had looked to him for a 
" new departure " in the national annals. The 
occasion was that of an address by the provincial 
assembly of Tver, in which he was asked to admit 
the people to a share in the responsibilities of 
government. Nicholas II. replied, with emphasis 
and deliberation, "I am aware that in certain 
meetings of the provincial assemblies, voices have 
lately been raised by persons carried away by 
absurd illusions about the participation of the 
members of such assemblies in matters of internal 
government. Let all know that, in devoting all 
my strength to the welfare of the people, I intend 
to protect the principle of autocracy as firmly and 
unswervingly as did my late and never-to-be-for- 
gotten father." Besides, moreover, refusing the 
request of the provincial assembly of Tver, the 
new ruler also rejected another petition of even 
greater significance, since it was the first request 
of a similar kind ever made by peasants of 
Russia. 

The most reactionary event in the reign of Nich- 
olas II. has been the abrogation of the constitu- 
tion of Finland, recognized and reaffirmed since 
1809 by every Russian monarch on his accession 
to the throne. In the early part of 1899, Nicholas 
drew to himself the attention of the intellectual 



158 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

and philanthropic everywhere by his praiseworthy 
effort to promote the world's peace. His famous 
" rescript," making proposals to the Powers for a 
reduction of armaments, resulted in the Peace 
Congress at the Hague. 



IX 

THE KELIGIOUS PROTEST 

Account must now be taken of another revolt, 
maintained since the seventeenth century by the 
dissenters of Russia, — men and women who, while 
joining in no political movement against the auto- 
cratic form of government in Russia, have none 
the less thrown off their allegiance to the Orthodox 
Church which that form of administration supports, 
and have never ceased to protest against the effort 
made by the state to deprive them of the right 
to freedom of thought in religious matters. The 
two forms of protest — the religious and the po- 
litical — apparently have little in common ; yet 
there is a connection between them which, in spite 
of their differences of aim, cannot be ignored. It 
is at least the connection between two bodies of 
enemies who, although not conjoined in any way, 
and working independently, are attacking the 
same fortress. But it is also something more. 
For if it be held that the sectarians are only op- 
posing the religious system of Russia, it may also 
be urged that the revolutionists attack autocracy 



160 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

in both state and church, and seek to bring 
about changes which will give Russia religious as 
well as political freedom. The two movements, 
therefore, being alike protests against absolutism 
in state and church, are connected, if by no other 
bond, by an alliance of interest which is vastly 
more significant than, without it, any merely 
formal union could be between the forces of politi- 
cal and of religious reform. 

But to understand the meaning of the religious 
situation in Russia to-day, when large bodies of 
sectarians are being driven over sea to foreign 
countries on account of their religious opinions, we 
must glance at the conditions in which it origi- 
nated more than three centuries ago. The first 
considerable outbreak of religious heresy in Rus- 
sia took place just before the advent of Peter the 
Great, and while essentially a protest against the 
authority of the state in religious matters, was 
precipitated by an effort, with the aid of the new 
learning of western Europe, to revise the texts of 
the church books, many passages in which — 
through the mistakes of copyists, incorrect render- 
ings, and even interpolated sentences and para- 
graphs — had become both misleading and 
injurious. It was the Tsar Vassily Ivanovich who 
first issued orders for the needed emendation of 
the sacred books and liturgies. The task was 



THE RELIGIOUS PROTEST 161 

intrusted to Maxim the Greek, but his work was 
soon rendered abortive by popular prejudice, a 
charge of perverting the church texts finally 
landing the monk in a cloister. The Patriarch 
Joseph, who next undertook to make the needed 
corrections, failed through ignorance of the origi- 
nal texts. At last the Patriarch Nikon took up 
in the seventeenth century the work begun in the 
sixteenth, and having obtained the assistance of 
ecclesiastical experts, carefully compared the church 
books with the original Greek manuscripts. Nikon 
not only corrected inaccuracies, but was enabled to 
discover and strike out many doubtful and spurious 
passages. His revision had the sanction of the 
Tsar and of two ecclesiastical councils. On its com- 
pletion, the revised texts were issued in printed 
form, and their use was made obligatory upon the 
people. 

But the popular mind was in no condition to 
accept unquestioningly these results of western 
scholarship. It looked upon the sacred texts with 
much the same superstitious awe as that with 
which a savage regards a bit of bark upon which 
a magic formula has been written ; and any 
change in the text of the church books, especially 
when wrought by men versed in the " unholy " 
knowledge of the West, was viewed as sacrilege. 
A large section of the people would have none 



162 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

of the revision, and its repudiation of Nikon's 
work at once brought about what has since been 
known in the Russian annals as the raskol — the 
schism or "split" in the church. The schismat- 
ics, who called themselves alternately " Old Be- 
lievers " and " Old Ritualists," originally differed 
from their Orthodox brethren mainly in trivial 
matters. They insisted, for example, in making 
the sign of the cross with two, instead of three 
fingers ; they sang the Hallelujah thrice instead of 
twice ; they celebrated the mass with seven pros- 
f oras instead of with five ; they retained the cross 
with eight branches instead of the cross with four ; 
and they spelled the name of Christ " Issus " in- 
stead of " Iissus." In other words, they re- 
tained those features in which the Russian Church 
resembled the Greek Church, and rejected the 
divergences from the latter which Nikon had in- 
troduced. It is in these various respects, more- 
over, that the Old Believers differ even at the 
present day from the Orthodox Church. But 
there was a time when the schism meant more 
than a protest against mere trivialities. For when 
Peter the Great sanctioned usages which were 
obnoxious to the schismatics and prohibited others 
which they favored, the dissent of the day ex- 
panded into a form of opposition to the state 
itself. Rejecting impartially the permissions and 



THE RELIGIOUS PROTEST 163 

the prohibitions of Peter ; championing the beard, 
which he had ordered to be shaved, and the old 
Russian dress, which he wished to abolish; de- 
nouncing the tobacco which he had introduced 
largely as a means of revenue as well as the coffee, 
tea, and sugar which he had brought in to con- 
tribute to an improved social condition — the Old 
Believers waged unrelentiug war upon the whole 
body of European reforms, and having reached 
the conclusion that every feature of the machinery 
of government, from the taking of the census to 
the keeping of a registry of births and deaths, was 
essentially evil in its purpose and nature, they 
carried their antagonism to the extreme of attri- 
buting the miserable condition of the country to 
the machinations of an anti-Christ Tsar. 

The effort to suppress the schism began under 
the Tsar who initiated the revision, for Alexe*i 
punished the dissenters not only with loss of civil 
privileges, but also with imprisonment and with 
exile. Under Peter the Great they were perse- 
cuted with relentless severity. The tolerance 
granted by Catherine the Great resulted in an 
enormous increase in their numbers. The schism 
had by this time developed into two forms of 
dissent, one constituting a church organization 
without priests, known as the " Priestless Sects," 
the other a body of religionists who retained the 



164 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

institution of the priesthood under the name of the 
" Hierarchists." It was under Catherine (1771) 
that the dissenters received permission by charter 
to establish a hospital and cemetery for the use 
of their co-religionists, and were thus for the first 
time formally recognized by the state. In the 
next year two centres of the schism were founded 
by two divisions of the Old Believers, — one at 
Rogozhsky by the Hierarchists, the other at Preo- 
brazhensky by the Priestless Sects, — and these 
have remained to this day. The consent of the 
Holy Synod to the ordination of priests who were 
to officiate in accordance with the ritual of the 
Old Believers was finally granted in 1800. From 
the reign of Paul to that of Elizabeth, the policy 
pursued by the authorities towards the dissenters 
was one of alternating favor and severity. In the 
reign of Nicholas I. the Hierarchists obtained an 
episcopate on Austrian, adjoining Eussian terri- 
tory ; but here they came so grievously into disre- 
pute that it was deemed advisable to confiscate 
their buildings and property, and replace their offi- 
ciating clergy by priests of the Orthodox faith. 
On the return of tolerance under Alexander III. 
the dissenters recovered their prestige. To-day 
the Old Believers who call themselves Hierarchists 
boast of some fifteen sees in various parts of the 
empire, with archbishops at Moscow and Kazan. 



THE RELIGIOUS PROTEST 165 

The Priestless division of the schism, with no 
ministers, but only " elders," has resulted rather 
in a striking development of sub-sects than in any 
foundation which caa properly be called a church. 
The peculiar views held by this division, as illus- 
trated by leading sects such as the " Theodosians " 
and the " Philippians " in their rejection of the 
sacraments, as well as of the priesthood, have 
brought out radical views on the subject of fam- 
ily life, together with a not infrequent resort to 
immoral practices. Yet there are also sects in this 
division whose members, living lives of purity, 
carry to an extreme their ascetic doctrine that the 
relations of the sexes are inherently evil. In the 
case of one group, that of the " Pilgrims," the 
believer gives up his family and previous associa- 
tions in order to live a wandering life in the forest. 
The " Mutes " are believed to represent the " Pil- 
grim" heresy in an especially disgruntled form. 
Then there are fanatical sects some of whom feel 
themselves called upon to choke or club to death 
new-born babes in order to save them from contact 
with a sinful world ; while others, regarding sui- 
cide as their only safety, starve themselves to 
death, burn themselves alive, or leap from high 
cliffs into the sea. 

So much for the dissent in Kussia which can be 
directly connected with the great religious revolt 



/ 



166 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

of the seventeenth century. We now come to the 
general movement of revolt against religious Or- 
thodoxy in Russia, — a movement which presents 
Russian dissent in its most active and vital forms. 
In the schism the Russian mind is prevailingly 
conservative, since the schismatics, properly so 
called, while their desire is for religious freedom, 
wish to use that freedom simply in a return to the 
past of their church and its observances. The 
general movement of dissent, on the other hand, — 
that which has been developed independently of 
Nikon and his reforms, — is made up of a body of 
schismatics who, by their activity in innovation, 
may be said to represent the spirit of religious va- 
riation, if not of religious progress in Russia. 
Latent in the church ever since the introduction 
of Christianity under Vladimir, this movement 
has never ceased to manifest itself, now as rever- 
sion to the original paganism of the people, and 
now as the survival or recrudescence of early 
Christian heresies brought into the country by 
travelers or by merchants. In modern times, 
some of the most popular phases of dissent may be 
traced to the initiative of the individual peasant 
who, aided by his active imagination and a fresh 
interpretation of scriptural texts, has rarely found 
it difficult to call together a band of followers, and 
thus to form a new sect. 



THE RELIGIOUS PROTEST 167 

In this free play of the religious mind all forms 
of dissent — the whimsical and eccentric, as well as 
the sober and rational — attain to more or less of or- 
ganized expression. The now well-known " Dukho- 
bortsy," or " Spirit- Wrestlers," large numbers of 
whom have been forced by the Russian govern- 
ment into exile, constitute one of the sects which 
manifest the so-called " rational tendencies." The 
members of this sect disbelieve in " spirit," and 
deny the existence of a personal God, saying that 
God is in the society of pious men, and exists 
individually in every good man. By an extension 
of this attitude, they also deny the divinity of 
Christ, whom they regard as simply possessing 
the excellences embodied in any other superla- 
tively good man. The Dukhobortsy refuse to 
recognize the authority of the Bible, and reject 
the Orthodox views regarding heaven and hell. 
Repudiating the ritual and creeds of the Orthodox 
Church, they oppose the authority and many of 
the regulations of the state. They hold it to be 
sinful to perform military service, and discounte- 
nance war in all its aspects. They refuse to pray 
for the Tsar, and deny his authority over them. 
Much more numerous than the Dukhobortsy, yet 
closely allied to them in beliefs, are the " Milk 
Drinkers," — a sect which has acquired its name 
from the fact that its members refuse to obey the 



168 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

church in its prohibition of milk on certain days 
in the calendar. Having no priests they are pre- 
sided over by elders or brothers ; they accept the 
parents' blessing in place of a marriage ceremony, 
adopt the Bible as their guide, and regard as their 
chief maxim the sentence, " God is a Spirit, and 
must be worshipped in spirit and in truth." 

One of the evangelical sects of Eussia which 
has attained to wide development in the south is 
known as the " Stunda," the doctrines of which 
seem to connect its members with the Baptists of 
the West. The sect originated in the neighbor- 
hood of Odessa, and took its name from the stwiden, 
or " hours " which the earliest of its members spent 
in the society of such German colonists as hap- 
pened to be solicitous concerning their spiritual 
welfare. The Stundists have no clergy, attach 
no value to the sacraments, and have given up 
observing the holidays of the church. Their re- 
ligious gatherings are remarkable for the simpli- 
city of the service. Under the presidency of an 
elder brother, they sing together, and hear chap- 
ters read from the Bible. There is no religious 
superior at these meetings whose authority is re- 
garded as preeminent ; all present have equal 
title, and are held equally qualified to comment 
upon the Scriptures and give instruction in them. 
The Stundists carry into their daily life, where 



THE RELIGIOUS PROTEST 169 

women enjoy equal rights with men, the same 
democratic ideas as those which find illustration 
in their religious observances. As a community, 
the members of the sect are noted all over Eussia 
for their honesty, sobriety, cleanliness, thrift. 
The Stunda first appeared as a sect of small di- 
mensions at Raslopol in the latter end of the 
sixties ; it is now known throughout southern 
Russia as one of the most thriving and prosperous 
of the evangelical sects. Its founder was the 
peasant Michael Ratushny. 

The general body of dissent in Russia contains 
mysticism, as well as rationalism and evangelicism. 
Among the most widely known of the " Mystics " 
are the "Flagellants," also called "People of 
God," from a designation given by themselves. 
The members of this sect meet by preference at 
night in some secluded place, clothed in white 
garments. Hymns are sung, and chapters read 
from the Bible. When the proper degree of ex- 
citement has been aroused, the worshipers begin 
a circling dance, which gradually increases in 
speed until, intoxicated and finally exhausted by 
the motion, they drop one by one to the floor. 
The power of prophecy then descends upon them, 
and the words they utter under its influence are 
claimed to be fraught with the highest importance ; 
in the state of trance, the " sensitive " is believed 



170 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

to be inspired by the Holy Ghost. Should the 
necessary exaltation not be forthcoming, the mem- 
bers lash themselves into a frenzy, and it is from 
this practice that they take their name. The 
Flagellants eschew fermented drinks, forbid mar- 
riage, enjoin strictest sexual purity, and put a ban 
upon all forms of oath-taking. The sect is said 
to have received its unwritten faith from God 
himself, incarnated as Daniel Philipovich, on the 
summit of a mountain in the government of Vla- 
dimir ; it is from this human incarnation that the 
Flagellants inherit what they call their twelve 
commandments. There is also a legend concern- 
ing the birth and crucifixion of their first Christ, 
one Ivan Timofeyevich. The charge of immoral 
practices, sometimes brought against the Flagel- 
lants, seems to have had more justification in the 
case of the "Jumpers," an allied sect which first 
came into prominence in the suburbs of St. Peters- 
burg. 

Among the miscellaneous sects of Russia may 
be mentioned the " Communists," differing from 
the Milk Drinkers only by holding property in 
common; the " Non-Prayers," an extreme division 
of the Priestless Sects ; the " Sabbatists ; " the 
" Chisleniki," who have their Sunday on Wednes- 
day ; the " Samobogi," who regard men as gods ; 
the " Dancers ; " the " Signers," etc. Most of the 



THE RELIGIOUS PROTEST 171 

sects have their founders, prophets, Madonnas, and 
Christs, their Bethlehems and their Nazareths. 
Thus Kapustin was the law-giver, and Pobirokhin 
the prophet, of the Dukhobortsy ; Michael Ra- 
tushny is revered as the founder of the Stunda; 
the Milk Drinkers, founded by Uklein, also re- 
member Popov as their apostle and Grigorov as 
their preacher ; Ivan Suslov labored as the 
" Christ " of the Flagellants, and is said to have 
undergone resurrection ; Xenia Ivanovna uttered 
prophecies for the " Ascetics ; " Adrian Pushkin 
was the Messiah of the "Sons of God;" Seliva- 
nov was recognized as the " true God " of the 
" Self -Mutilators ; " Anna Romanovna played her 
part as the priestess of the " Eunuchs ; " and 
Madame Tatarinov officiated as leader of a sect 
of fashionable Mystics meeting in St. Petersburg. 
Among the still living apostles of popular dissent 
may be mentioned the evangelist peasant Sutayev, 
who describes Christianity as " charity," and aims 
at the " organization of a Christian life ; " and the 
famous writer Tolstoy, who, denying the soul's 
survival after death, also translates the meaning 
of religion into terms of social life, and works for 
a salvation which is to be realized in the world 
which we now inhabit rather than in some future 
condition of existence. 

What, finally, is the modern attitude of the 



172 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

Russian state towards the dissenters under ita 
control? The fact that these now number be- 
tween 12,000,000 and 15,000,000 makes the ques- 
tion one of importance for Christendom in general. 
That the schism proper has finally emerged from 
the persecution which was originally its normal 
lot we have already seen. By decrees dated 1883 
and 1884, Alexander III. gave the Old Believ- 
ers freedom to worship in accordance with their 
own rites. Yet various harassing restrictions 
still remain. Thus the schismatics are not per- 
mitted to build chapels with their own money, 
and cannot receive bequests made in their favor. 
Their priests may be expelled and their prayer 
books suppressed. Still greater restrictions and 
hardships press upon the general body of Russian 
dissenters whose schism has been developed inde- 
pendently of the revolt which followed upon the 
reforms of Nikon. They are not only liable to be 
proceeded against at any moment as " anti-social," 
" dangerous," and " disloyal : " for years they have 
been subjected to active persecution by the author- 
ities. In the reign of Alexander III., several of 
the sects, especially the Milk Drinkers and the 
Stundists, were treated with great harshness. The 
official war waged against the Dukhob<5rtsy, begun 
in the reign of Alexander III. and continued un- 
der Nicholas II., has had the effect of forcing 



THE RELIGIOUS PROTEST 173 

considerable bodies of this sect over sea into such 
places of exile as could be secured for them in 
the United States and Canada. 

It is to be borne in mind that the law of Rus- 
sia not only forbids the Orthodox from changing 
their religious faith — it punishes the offense with 
the loss of all civil rights, and even permits an 
offender's property to be taken possession of by 
his relatives. No proselytism is allowed in any 
other interest than that of the Orthodox Church. 
Desertion of the church is a crime, and it becomes 
the duty of a father, of a mother, or of other rela- 
tives to inform against the deserter. It is under 
laws such as these that the government authorities, 
cooperating with the Holy Synod and its chief pro- 
curator Pobyedon<5stsev, have inflicted upon the 
Roman Catholics of Poland, the Uniats of Russia 
and Poland, the Lutherans of the Baltic provinces, 
and the German Mennonites, various forms of per- 
secution for religious opinion. The treatment of 
the Jews, carried out not only unofficially by anti- 
Semitic mobs, but also officially in the summer 
and autumn of 1882, under the authority of the 
notorious " May Laws," as well as of subsequent 
decrees signed by the Emperor himself, was such 
as to call forth the condemnation of the civilized 
world. It is said that between April of 1881 and 
June of 1882 no fewer than 225,000 Jewish fami- 



174 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

lies, comprising over a million souls, were forced 
to leave Kussia under circumstances for the most 
part of inconceivable hardship. Nor have the 
laws which compelled this migration undergone 
any important change. Under Nicholas II., as 
under Alexander III., the Jews are subject to re- 
strictions imposed upon no other race or body of 
religionists in the empire. Compelled to reside in 
the southwestern governments known as the Pale, 
they live there under the stress of untold hardship, 
constantly recruit the ranks of pauperism, and in 
towns already overcrowded fall an easy prey to 
hunger and disease. Industrial and social disabili- 
ties block their path in every direction. Perhaps 
the most cruel of all the prohibitions from which 
this gifted and ambitious race suffers in Russia is 
the intellectual prohibition, since by means of a 
law which admits to the gymnasia and universities 
a proportion of only three to five per* cent of 
Hebrew students, the Jews are deprived of educa- 
tional opportunities granted everywhere abroad, 
and to people of other races and faiths even in 
Russia. 

Such, then, is the religious situation in the em- 
pire ; and as we recall its chief features, we shall 
find it impossible to avoid the conclusion that, as 
in the political, so in the religious aspect of its 
life, Russia is living in the Middle Ages. To 



THE RELIGIOUS PROTEST 175 

expect it to nourish a religious life like that of 
the West would be to ignore the plain facts. 
For the Russia of to-day, with its forest regions, 
its continental climate, its vast and isolating dis- 
tances, is preeminently the country of a primitive 
religion. Nor is it too much to say that the 
masses who occupy its uniform plains, bound from 
generation to generation in the toils of the same 
monotonous labor, and deprived of everything save 
the mere glimmer of our modern knowledge which 
they get in the sight of a locomotive or of an agri- 
cultural implement — as utterly " vacant of our 
glorious gains " as if they were living in Thibet 
— that such a people, in all that relates to reli- 
gious belief and practice, are little removed from 
the condition of which the stories about classical 
Greece and Rome remind us. They have scarcely 
yet outgrown what might be called the stage of 
inflexion in religion, — the period of mental devel- 
opment in which spirits and deities are assigned 
by the imagination to all the great classes of ap- 
pearances in nature which suggest supernatural 
power. Hence, though monotheism is the avowed 
faith of the Orthodox Church, the Russian peasant 
continues to believe more or less in the original 
polytheism of his pagan ancestors. He does not 
name the various divinities, and may not hold them 
consciously apart in his mind ; yet he finds their 



176 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

chief characters again in the attributes which he 
has been taught to associate with the principal 
saints of the Christian calendar. As seen, more- 
over, in his superstitions, in those spirit invoca- 
tions and magic formulae which form so consider- 
able a part of popular literature, he continues to 
believe in the existence of that same spirit world 
which Grand-Prince Vladimir, by a mere ceremony 
of baptism, vainly supposed that he could banish 
forever from the Eussian land. 

As the conditions of life in Kussia have deter- 
mined the character of its people, so the people 
have in turn determined the character of the church 
and the state. As the peasants give their " prac- 
tical consent " to the autocracy, enabling it to sur- 
vive in defiance of the aspirations of the cultured 
minority, so do they give a similar consent to the 
existence of the Orthodox Church, and by doing 
this, secure the perpetuation of creeds and beliefs 
which to the advanced mind of Eussia have be- 
come, not only antipathetic, but even intolerable. 
The situation is thus one which is exploited to the 
utmost by the ruling class. Strong in the know- 
ledge that absolutism in both church and state is 
sanctioned by the great body of the people, the 
autocracy can afford to ignore the religious as well 
as the political needs of the educated minority. 
Maintaining that demand for absolute uniformity 



THE RELIGIOUS PROTEST 177 

of belief which is a character of the older, and not 
of the newer civilizations, Russia regards religious 
disloyalty as equally wicked and injurious with 
political disloyalty, and continues to punish people, 
as they did in the Middle Ages, for even trivial 
divergences from the religious creeds and practices 
imposed by the state. And while it regards the 
existing institutions as satisfactorily supplying the 
church wants of the common people, it makes no 
provision for the higher religious needs of the edu- 
cated classes. 

It is this practical denial of religion to culture 
in Russia which must be held responsible for any 
justification there may be in the charge of irreli- 
giousness so often brought against the movement 
for constitutional reform. In western Europe and 
in the United States, the educated classes have 
unlimited opportunities of decision as to what par- 
ticular religious faith is worthy of their allegiance. 
Unable to cooperate with one church, the religion- 
ist has a hundred others — each a degree more 
liberal or more conservative that the rest — from 
which he may make his choice. But in Eussia a 
chasm yawns between the religious system which 
the state thrusts upon its educated minority and 
the ideal faith which its members would be likely 
to join were religious thought free. And this 
chasm is made impassable by the pains and penal- 



178 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

ties with which the state chains its subjects to the 
faith of the national church. So that in Kussia 
an educated man must choose between Orthodoxy 
and absolute unbelief ; between membership of a 
church which, with its iconostases, its relics and 
holy icons, recalls the religious traditions of the 
fifteenth century, and that absolute withdrawal 
from all religious observances which is not infre- 
quently met with in the political radical of Kussia 
who, rejecting absolutism in the state, has been 
forced to give it up also in the church. It is 
perhaps one of the most serious features of the 
situation that many make this choice in such a way 
as to intensify rather than lessen the existing an- 
tagonism of interest between the head and the 
heart of Russia — between the classes upon whom 
the nation must depend for its progress and the 
populations who supply the power on which rests 
the autocratic system in both church and state. 



THE STORY OF RUSSIAN EXPANSION 

So much for the internal development of the 
Russian state. We have now to glance at the 
extraordinary way in which the energies of that 
state have been devoted to the work of colonization. 
The Russian Slav was a pioneer by racial habit 
even in the days of the Varyags. The earlier expan- 
sion in European Russia was begun by the soldier, 
the colonist, and the peasant long before the gov- 
ernment of the country had reached its final form. 
Under the udyelny system, settlement by conquest 
or peaceful colonization went on over large tracts of 
territory to the north and east. This movement, 
while it formed a splendid preparation for the 
more durable forms of nation-building that were 
to follow, could have no more than a temporary 
character, for when the udyelny system fell to 
pieces, and the autocratic form of government 
took its place, Russia had to make a new territorial 
as well as a new political beginning. The coun- 
try now shrank to a fragment of its former self ; 
and from the mere nucleus of empire known in 



180 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

the times of Daniel as the principality of Moscow, 
there began that wonderful process by which — 
through the action, first, of grand-princes on the 
way to becoming autocrats, and finally of the 
representatives of a tsardom fully constituted, 
one of whom, Ivan the Third, went into national 
annals as the " gatherer " of the Russian earth — 
all the territories previously acquired by the re- 
publics, or by the udyelny princes, were one by 
one reacquired and added to the dominions of 
Muscovy. But the process was by no means 
rounded off in the absorption of lands which had 
originally belonged to men of Russian nationality. 
It went on also at the expense of foreign peo- 
ples. Thus, in the reign of Peter the Great, at the 
peace of Nystadt in 1721, Russia took from the 
Swedes as her share Livonia, Esthonia, Ingria, 
and a part of Karelia. By the partition of Po- 
land, partly accomplished in the administration of 
Catherine the Great, and completed in 1815, 
Russia absorbed the territories known as White- 
Russia, Lithuania, Podolia, Little-Russia (includ- 
ing the Ukraine), and eastern Poland. Finland, 
as far as the Tornea, was ceded to Alexander I. in 
1809 by the peace of Fredrikshamn ; in the same 
reign (1812), Russia acquired Bessarabia by the 
treaty of Bukharest. The bulk of the territory in 
and about the Caucasus, with its picturesque 



THE STORY OF RUSSIAN EXPANSION 181 

scenery and strange races, passed from Persia to 
Russia during the reigns of Alexander I. and 
Nicholas I. 

No more than a few centuries were needed for 
the people of Russia to fill up the plain west of 
the Ural Mountains ; and a less virile race would 
have been content to remain within the boundaries 
thus apparently marked out for them by nature. 
We have only to glance at the statue of Yermak, 
in which the sculptor Antakolsky seems to have 
given us, not merely the sturdy, thick-set frame, 
the broad shoulders, the intelligent countenance, 
and the keen glance of the Cossack chieftain who 
discovered Siberia, but also, perhaps, the typical 
physical traits of the Russian pioneer in the far 
east, to realize how little a chain of mountains, or 
even the sea itself, would be likely to stay the 
march of men who were migrants by racial habit, 
and whose settlements in European Russia had 
been little more than resting places by the way. 
One does not wonder, therefore, to find that the 
enterprising Novgorodians, if only for purposes of 
barter, had crossed the Urals in advance of Yer- 
mak, or that as early as 1499 the Muscovites had 
penetrated with an armed force as far as the river 
Ob. Yet before the sixteenth century there had 
been no effort to settle in the country. The first 
attempt to gain a foothold by conquest came 



182 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

through the enterprise of a merchant named 
Stroganov, to whom Tsar Ivan the Terrible had 
granted certain rights in connection with a tract 
of land on the banks of the Kama. Among the 
men who entered his service was one Yermak 
Timofeyevich, originally a river pirate, who had 
escaped from the Volga with the more daring of 
his followers. And it was to Yermak that the 
Stroganovs intrusted the charge of an expedition 
to the land of Yugra, celebrated for its furs. Yer- 
mak set forth on New Year's Day, 1581, at the 
head of a force of 800 men, armed with cannon and 
arquebuses. The chieftain traversed the Urals, 
made his way eastward, attacked the Tatar khan 
Kuchum, and carried by assault his chief city, 
Sibir, from which the country afterwards took its 
name. The success of Yermak created much ex- 
citement in Moscow, and the Tsar, who had shown 
displeasure on hearing of the expedition, sent a 
military leader, with a body of militia, to take 
charge of the conquered territory. Sibir after- 
wards dwindled in importance, and finally disap- 
peared ; but the Russian settlement was main- 
tained, and the city of Tob61sk, founded in 1587, 
sixteen versts from the scene of Yermak' s victory, 
was the beginning of a colonizing movement which 
has since had the whole of Siberia for its field. 
The colonists first took the northern routes in 



THE STORY OF RUSSIAN EXPANSION 183 

order to avoid the resistance offered to their ad- 
vance by hostile tribes to the south. Navigating 
the embranching rivers by means of long, raft-like 
vessels, — afloat for a month or two in the brief 
Siberian summer, and then for the long winter 
season almost buried beneath snow, their log huts 
distinguishable from the more primitive dwelling 
of the aborigine only by the raised wooden cross, 
— the hardy Cossacks, building their forts at the 
confluences of the streams as they went, little by 
little extended the dominion of Eussia in a vast 
territory hitherto wholly unexplored. In 1593 we 
find them at Berezov, far up towards the mouth 
of the Ob ; by 1618-20 they have left settlements 
on the Yenisei, and founded the city of Yeniseisk. 
Discovering the Lena Eiver, they build in 1632 
the fort which afterwards becomes the town of 
Yakutsk; the explorers reach the river Kolyma 
thence in 1645. The first Cossack " Thalassa ! 
Thalassa ! " must have burst from the throats of 
the pioneers in 1636, for it was in that year that 
they came within sight of the Pacific at the Sea 
of Okhotsk. A fort was built on this sea in 
1647 by Ivan Afanasiev, after a fierce struggle 
with the aborigines. The founding of Irkutsk 
near Lake Baikal, in the year 1661, gave Eussia 
a station which has since become the great empo- 
rium of Asiatic trade in Siberia. The lonely and 



184 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

curiously shaped peninsula of Kamchatka, des- 
tined to be the scene of many a conflict with the 
natives, was discovered and taken possession of in 
1697 by a peasant explorer named Vladimir Atla- 
sov, but was not finally claimed as Russian terri- 
tory until 1707. 

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, 
the Russian flag waved over all the territories of 
eastern Siberia. But the Russians were still 
excluded from the southern reaches of the Pacific, 
and the only obstacle to further progress in this 
direction was offered by the province of the Amur, 
which had been definitely reserved to China by 
the treaty of Nerchinsk, signed by Russia with 
China in 1689. The importance of the Amur 
region for Russia was little understood at St. 
Petersburg until Nicholai Muraviev came into im- 
perial politics as governor-general of eastern Sibe- 
ria (1847). Uniting the wisdom of the statesman 
with the skill of the diplomatist, and something 
of the dash and enterprise of the explorer, this 
patriotic official early gave his attention to the 
maturing of a scheme for completing the conquest 
of northern Asia. Responsible for the victualing 
of certain Russian settlements in Chinese terri- 
tory on the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Ta- 
tary, and needing for this purpose the waterways 
of the Amur, Muraviev boldly determined to 



THE STORY OF RUSSIAN EXPANSION 185 

seize the coveted province in the name of Russia. 
He had the help, in his preparations, of Captain 
Nevelsky, commander of the brig Baikal, and this 
officer did not hesitate to make the first move by 
steaming up towards the mouth of the Amur, and 
taking possession, in the name of Russia, of any 
territory which attracted him. In 1851 Nevel- 
sky, with the sanction of the Tsar, occupied the 
island of Sakhalin. In 1852 he founded first 
Petrovsk, afterwards Nikolayevsk. It was on 
this occasion that Emperor Nicholas, being called 
upon to intervene in a dispute as to whether the 
settlements named should be maintained, made the 
remark, " Where the Russian flag has once been 
hoisted, it must not be lowered." 

Muraviev made his first expedition into Amur 
territory in 1851-3. Other expeditions followed, 
carrying soldiers and colonists ; and in 1858 the 
governor-general of eastern Siberia was able to 
lay the foundation of the town of Blagoveshchensk, 
as well as of Khabarovsk, at the mouth of the 
Ussuri. It was in this same year, moreover, that 
MuravieV reached the summit of his fame by 
obtaining from the Chinese, then humiliated by 
defeat in the war with France and England, the 
treaty of Aigun, signed in May, 1858, which sur- 
rendered all the territory on the left bank of the 
Amur to the Russians. Through the subsequent 



186 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

Treaty of Pekin, of November 14, 1860, General 
Ignatiev obtained for Russia the cession of the 
maritime province of Manchuria, between the 
Ussuri Eiver and the sea. By the operation of 
these agreements, Russia became possessor of the 
whole of northern Asia, and by special permis- 
sion of China was enabled (1860) to occupy Vladi- 
vostok, and make of this her naval port in the far 
east. But in order to give its full political and 
strategical value to the movement of expansion 
begun three centuries before by Yermak, she still 
needed an adequate railway system, and this was 
finally decided upon in March, 1891, when Tsar 
Alexander III. formally authorized the construc- 
tion of the Siberian railway in a rescript which 
was promulgated at Vladivostok, the eastern 
terminus of the line, on May 12 of the same year, 
by the Tsesarevich, now Nicholas II. of Russia, 
who laid the foundation stone. This railway, fast 
approaching completion, is estimated to cost nearly 
350,000,000 rubles, and will involve the con- 
struction of some 4714 miles of line. It should 
be added that on the occasion of the German 
occupation of Kiao-chou, Russia obtained further 
concessions from China which enabled her (1897) 
to acquire Port Arthur and Ta-lien-wan, nearly 
five degrees south of Vladivostok, with the right 
to connect these ports by means of branch lines 



THE STORY OF RUSSIAN EXPANSION 187 

with the Siberian railway system. In 1900 
Russia also succeeded in obtaining, as a coaling 
station, the harbor of Masampho on the southwest 
coast of Korea. 

Meanwhile the Russians had been expanding 
also in Central Asia, through lands which, for the 
popular imagination, added much of the mystery 
of fable to the peril of adventure. Stretching be- 
yond the Caspian westward as far as Mongolia, 
extending from southern Siberia to the mountain- 
ous borders of Afghanistan, there lay an immense 
stretch of unexplored territory such as, in the time 
of Vladimir, must have dominated the expanding 
nucleus of Russian nationality like some great 
qfficina gentium, — some mighty simmering pot of 
races,' — from which the warlike hordes of Asia 
were regularly poured forth upon the Slav country 
through the open land below the Urals. It was 
here that the Pechenegs worked their way east- 
ward, here that the Polovtsy harassed the Chris- 
tians newly converted from Constantinople, and 
here also that the Tatars came through to devas- 
tate the country, to carry its people into captivity, 
and to hang about its limbs the chains of a serfdom 
which for over two centuries brought its intellec- 
tual life to a standstill. Only when the Russians 
had gained strength enough to beat back the invad- 
ers, and to take possession of their strongholds in 



188 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

Europe, could the movement of expansion into 
Central Asia properly begin. In the unauthorized 
raids which naturally preceded this movement, it 
was the Cossacks of the Ural who were the first to 
take the initiative. The earliest official relations 
with Central Asia seem to have been opened in 
1700, when the Khan of Khiva petitioned to be 
taken under the protection of Peter the Great. 
No response was given by the Tsar, but in 1715 he 
sent Prince Bekovich-Cherkassky to explore the 
lower reaches of the Sir Darya for gold, as well as 
to make investigations in connection with the 
scheme for turning the course of the Oxus so that 
it might flow once more into the Caspian. An 
expedition was the result of Bekovich's favorable 
report, but owing to the treachery of the new ruler 
of Khiva, the Russians were massacred to a man. 
For a while the agents of the Tsar turned their 
attention to other parts of Central Asian territory. 
Thus Omsk and the middle course of the Irtish be- 
came Russian in 1716-19. In 1731 the Kirghiz 
of the Middle Horde surrendered their territory to 
Anna Ivanovna, and thus gave Russia her first foot- 
hold in lands claimed by the khanates of Khiva and 
Bukhara. The settlement of Orenburg, in 1743, 
provided at once a convenient rendezvous for the 
caravan trade, and a starting point for military 
expeditions. In 1803 the Tsar received the sub- 



THE STORY OF RUSSIAN EXPANSION 189 

mission of the tribes of the Mangishlak peninsula, 
on the eastern shores of the Caspian ; in 1832 the 
Little Horde was included within the government 
of Orenburg, the western Kirghiz being made sub- 
ject to that of western Siberia. The time had 
now come for settling accounts with the Khivans, 
whose detention of Eussian prisoners had grown 
into a formidable evil. The news of a first expe- 
dition against them led the khan to release his 
prisoners at the instance of an English officer ; on 
hearing of a second, the khan submitted to Eus- 
sia, and hastened, in 1842, to conclude a treaty of 
peace with the Tsar. The Eussians meanwhile 
continued to strengthen their hold upon the Central 
Asian territory already occupied. Fort Perovsky, 
for example, raised in 1853 over the ruins of the 
fortress of Ak-Muzhid, which had been held by the 
Khan of Khokand, gave them a dominating position 
on the Sir Darya, 280 miles from its mouth. In 
October, 1864, General Chernayev took Chem- 
kent, the capital of Turkestan, and shortly after- 
wards received the submission of Tashkent. In 
1865 Tashkent was made the metropolis of the 
frontier district of Turkestan; in July, 1867, it 
became the headquarters of a governor-general 
appointed for that district. 

The Eussian advance in Central Asia having in 
the mean time begun to attract the attention of 



190 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

the other European powers, it was deemed ad- 
visable to offer an explanation of the Russian 
policy. This was done by Prince Gortchakoff in 
a circular dated November 21, 1864. In this 
paper he dwelt on the dilemma in which civilized 
states in contact with wandering tribes found 
themselves. Control was necessary over such peo- 
ple, but the tribes brought into subjection became 
in turn the victims of similar aggression on the 
part of more remote tribes. Thus the process had 
to be repeated until the dominating power came 
into direct contact with one which afforded rea- 
sonable guarantees that it could maintain order 
within its own territory. It was while the Rus- 
sians were drawing comfort from such reasoning 
as this that the three great states of Central Asia 
which had thus far succeeded in maintaining their 
independence — the khanates of Bukhara, Khiva, 
and Khokand — were preparing to make a final 
stand against the invader. Alarmed at the victo- 
rious advance of the Russians, they did not hesi- 
tate to make common cause with one another. 
But their resistance was unavailing. General 
Romanovsky first signally defeated them on May 
20, 1866, when a Bukharan force of 5000 infantry 
and 35,000 mounted troops were compelled to 
make a disorderly retreat. In October of the 
same year the border strongholds of Ura-tepe and 



THE STORY OF RUSSIAN EXPANSION 191 

Jizak were captured ; the seizure of Yani Kurgan, 
in the beginning of 1867, gave to Eussia the con- 
trol of the Sir Darya basin. On May 12, 1868, 
the conjoined forces of Bukhara and Khiva, to the 
number of 40,000, were defeated by the troops 
under General Kaufmann, and the fall of Samar- 
kand on the following day led, on June 18, 1868, 
to the cession by treaty of that city, of the Katta 
Kurgan, and the Valley of the Zerafshan. 

The reduction of Khiva was the necessity now 
forced upon the Eussians, not only by the depre- 
dations of Khivan robbers, but also by the atti- 
tude of the khan himself, who had begun to levy 
taxes on tribes under Eussian influence, and had 
threatened to proclaim a holy war. In 1873 three 
columns moved against the city, one commanded 
by General Kaufmann, of 5500 men and eighteen 
guns ; the other under Colonel Markosov, of 3000 
troops ; and the third in charge of General Verev- 
kin. Each column had a different starting point 
and a particular route of its own, but all were to 
meet at Khiva. General Verevkin was the first to 
reach his destination, and it was his attack upon 
the city, on May 9, which placed it at the dis- 
posal of the Eussians. General Kaufmann came 
up later, entering Khiva on June 10, 1873. Not 
content with the passive part which he and his 
officers were thus compelled to play in the affair, 



192 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

Kaufmann promptly planned a campaign against 
the Turkoman Yomuds, who were unfortunate 
enough to have settlements on Khivan terri- 
tory. Under the pretext of punishing them for 
neglect to pay in money the sum of 310,000 ru- 
bles within twelve days, he ordered his lieutenant 
Golovachev to exterminate the tribe, sparing 
neither sex nor age. This order was faithfully 
carried out, and for five days the Khiva oasis 
resounded with the shrieks of the victims. The 
treaty which followed this massacre, dated October 
10, 1873, transferred to Eussia all Khivan territory 
to the right of the river Oxus. Yet at an inter- 
view in London with Earl Granville in January, 
1873, nine months previously, Count Schouvaloff, 
besides disclaiming, on behalf of his imperial mas- 
ter, Alexander II., any intention on the part of 
Russia to annex territory in Central Asia, had 
described the sole object of the expedition then 
about to be dispatched to Khiva as being " to 
punish acts of brigandage, to recover fifty Eussian 
prisoners, and to teach the khan that such conduct 
on his part could not be continued with impunity." 
The Count added, moreover, that positive orders 
had been given not to annex Khiva. And when, 
two years later, civil war in Khokand gave a new 
pretext for interference in the affairs of the khan- 
ates, the Eussians again interposed in behalf of 



THE STORY OF RUSSIAN EXPANSION 193 

order. The Khokandian army made its last stand 
at Makhram, and was there early in 1875 literally 
annihilated. It took about a year to effect the 
" subjugation " of the disturbed territory ; and 
then, in March, 1876, the khanate of Khokand was 
by proclamation annexed to the Russian empire 
under the name of Fergana, with General Sko- 
belev as its governor. 

For the complete domination of Central Asia 
the Russians now needed only the possession of 
the Turkoman territory. This was a triangular 
piece of land, some 240,000 square miles in extent, 
connecting the Caspian with the course of the 
Amu Dariya. Here dwelt, in the oases of Merv 
and Akkhal, with Merv as their chief city, the 
Tekke branch of the Turkomans, a nomadic, war- 
like race, originally of Turkic stock, which had in- 
habited the Altai Mountains and the upper regions 
of the Yenisei and the Irtish rivers. Though in 
frequent collision with the Persian authorities, the 
Tekkes had thus far evaded all attempts to subju- 
gate or civilize them. Organized for robbery, em- 
boldened by success, the terror of the individual 
caravan and the scourge of Central Asian com- 
merce, these picturesque marauders were none the 
less marked out for removal by the forces that 
were transforming the civilization of southern 
Asia. The first blow against their domination 



194 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

was struck with the formation of the new province 
or military district of Transcaspia, including all 
the territory between the Caspian and the Aral 
seas, with General Lomakin as its governor, and 
headquarters at Krasnovodsk. In the early part 
of 1877 Lomakin occupied the Tekke fortress of 
Kizil Arvat, 200 miles from Krasnovodsk, and in 
1879 made his first and last attempt to subjugate 
the enemy, being forced with his troops into igno- 
minious retreat from the Tekke stronghold at 
Geok-Tepe by some 20,000 defenders turned into 
demons by the butchery of their women. Taking 
the place of the incompetent and superseded Lo- 
makin, General Sk6belev marched on Geok-Tepe 
at the head of an attacking force of thoroughly 
disciplined troops, armed with breech-loaders, 
Hotchkiss machine guns, mitrailleuses, rocket ap- 
paratus, and a supply of petroleum shells. Laying 
down a line of railroad inland for about fifteen 
miles from the Caspian for transport purposes, 
and taking several Turkoman strongholds on the 
way, Skobelev found himself on January 1, 1881, 
before Danghil-Tepe, 1 — an inclosure forming an 
irregular parallelogram about a mile in area, sur- 
rounded by a thick mud wall, and occupied by 
about 30,000 Tekke*s, with whom were some 7000 

1 Originally the name of a mound at the northwest angle of 
the fortification. Situated in the district of Geok-Tepe. 



THE STORY OF RUSSIAN EXPANSION 195 

women and children. The work of storming the 
fortification began at once. On January 24, after 
a siege which lasted more than three weeks, during 
which the assaulting party was constantly inter- 
rupted in its work by the desperate sallies of the 
defenders, who attacked the soldiers in the trenches, 
the Kussians succeeded in effecting an entrance, 
drove the Tekkes from their stronghold, and forced 
them into flight across the plain beyond. The 
struggle cost the Kussians 1200 men in killed and 
wounded ; the loss of the Tekke*s has been stated 
as 9000 out of a total of 30,000.! In asking for 
recruits, Skobelev had entreated his superiors to 
send him only soldiers who would have no opinion 
of their own in regard to the " hard necessities of 
war," and officers " whose sole idea is their duty, 
and who do not entertain visionary sentiments." 
When the Tekkds had begun their headlong re- 
treat, Skobelev ordered a pursuit, instructing the 
troops to give no quarter. In obedience to this 
order, the- fugitives — men, women, and children — 
were hacked by the pursuing column for a distance 
of nearly twelve miles. This victory has been 
described as " not a rout, but a massacre ; not a 
defeat, but an extirpation ; " yet it was a victory 
over a people whom Skobelev himself, in his pro- 

1 According to the " minimized " estimates of General Kuro- 
patkin. 



196 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

clamation to the troops before the battle, declared 
to be " full of honor and courage." And after the 
defeat of the Tekk^s, the Russians were allowed 
to loot for four days, and to possess themselves of 
property worth more than half a million sterling. 

Two months later news came of the assassination 
of Alexander II. , and Skobelev was recalled to St. 
Petersburg. The Russian policy in Central Asia 
rested for a time, in accordance with the instruc- 
tions of the new Tsar ; but it was taken up again, 
and in January, 1884, through diplomacy, aided 
by a demonstration in force, the conquest of the 
Turkoman territory was rendered practically com- 
plete by the acquisition of Merv and the Merv 
oasis. The Yolatan oasis, thirty-six miles south 
of Merv, and the territory of the eastern Giaour 
and Sarakhs tribes, were soon afterwards surren- 
dered to Russia. The questions relating to the 
possession of the other territory bordering on 
Persia and northern Afghanistan, after occasion- 
ing disquietude in England, on account of its stra- 
tegic importance, were finally left to the decision 
of a Joint Boundary Commission which met at St. 
Petersburg in April, 1887, General Sir Peter 
Lumsden being the English representative, and 
General Zelenoy the Russian commissioner. By 
this decision Russia obtained the right bank of the 
Hari-Rud as far as Zu-1-Fikar Pass and the valleys 



THE STORY OF RUSSIAN EXPANSION 197 

of the Badghis south of and including the Panjdih 
oasis, and was thus entitled to advance the south- 
ern boundaries of her Asiatic possessions to a point 
within fifty-three miles of Herat in a straight line. 
The work of demarcating the spheres of English 
and Eussian influence on the Pamirs was per- 
formed in August, 1895, by the English and 
Russian representatives, the three great Asiatic 
empires being found to meet " amidst a solitary 
wilderness, 20,000 feet above sea level, absolutely 
inaccessible to man, and within the ken of no 
living creature except the Pamir eagles." Sko- 
belev's provisional line of railroad has since been 
carried by successive stages into the very heart of 
Central Asia. With a western terminus at Kras- 
novodsk, it now passes through Samarkand as far 
as Tashkent, and has branch lines extending to 
Andijan in the province of Fergana, and south- 
ward (Murghab River branch) from Merv to 
Kushk, which is within five miles of the Afghan 
frontier. The latter branch has been constructed 
for strategic as well as commercial purposes, and 
would be used with effect should the English ever 
jeopardize Russian interests in Central Asia by 
the occupation of Herat. 1 

This brief sketch of the Russian eastward move- 
ment reveals facts which are without precedent in 

1 See statement of Baron Jomini to Lord Dufferin in 1879. 



198 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

the history of national expansion. It took the 
Americans two centuries to reach the Pacific from 
their settlements in the east; the Russians trav- 
ersed the whole northern course of the Asiatic 
continent in about seventy .years. The Asiatic 
possessions of Russia amount to 6,564,700 square 
miles, and this enormous stretch of territory, with 
its population of 18,915,335, including 101 dis- 
tinct non-Slav races, has been added to European 
Russia in the course of about three centuries. The 
acquirement of most of the Siberian territory was 
achieved by a process of exploration alternating 
with settlement, in which successful diplomacy 
counted for much, and the pioneers had the aid at 
critical moments of small bodies of soldiery. The 
native peoples occasionally offered the most de- 
termined resistance ; the attitude towards Russian 
advance shown by the Chinese, who also had im- 
perial interests at stake, was throughout that of an 
unprogressive and unenterprising race which con- 
tributed by its own apathy something of the jus- 
tification needed for its displacement. In more 
southern latitudes the Russian movement, espe- 
cially in its modern stages, took the form of a 
military conquest of peoples who were either 
plunderers by profession or constant disturbers of 
the general welfare. The northern advance 
through Siberia, again, may fairly be regarded as 



THE STORY OF RUSSIAN EXPANSION 199 

a continuation of the movement which carried the 
earlier Russian colonizers from Kiev and Moscow as 
far as the Urals ; in the expansion through Central 
Asia we are entitled to see the migratory tenden- 
cies of the Russian people developed into a state 
policy. The result of the whole movement north 
and south has been to enormously increase the 
official responsibilities of the Russian government, 
to say nothing of the involved imposition of new 
burdens upon the people. 

The fact that the colonization described has 
been entirely over land carries with it the disad- 
vantage of enforced defense and administration of 
the territory acquired. Not only has Russia been 
unable to anticipate the prospect of independence 
for her many colonies : she has been obliged to 
administer them from a capital on the western 
verge of a territory whose furthermost eastern 
boundary is reached only at an interval of thou- 
sands of miles from St. Petersburg. It must also 
be borne in mind that throughout the period of 
her colonizing activity, Russia has been devoting 
to the acquirement of territory which her overflow 
population will not need for hundreds of years yet 
to come, energies which a smaller country would 
have spent in internal development, especially in 
political progress. The actual use made of her 
military forces has been shown, especially in the 



200 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

Central Asian campaigns, to depend almost as 
much upon the caprice of leaders in the field as 
upon the nature of a policy dictated from St. 
Petersburg. Yet while her severity in overcoming 
resistance is unexampled, she loses no time in 
cultivating good relations with the foe she has 
vanquished ; certainly her tolerance of his religious 
faith and of his semi-barbaric customs goes far to 
make him forget the price which his race has paid 
for their resistance. But beyond this there is little 
to be said. Eussia has not yet begun to assimilate 
the Asiatic peoples who acknowledge her sway. 
While they have gained — and gained greatly — 
in the order and other material advantages she 
introduces, they continue to be Asiatics ; and any 
coherence with Russia which they have thus far 
acquired is the solidarity which results, not from 
common intellectual habits and social structure, 
but from impressed military rule. It is none the 
less fortunate that an eastward movement under- 
taken for private advantage should have done so 
much to promote general interests, and that Rus- 
sia, herself somewhat of the Orient, and therefore 
specially qualified, should have been the first to 
make a serious beginning in the transformation of 
Asia, a task now raised by recent events in China 
to the dignity of a world problem. 



XI 

SIBEEIA AND THE EXILE SYSTEM 

An account of Russia which made no mention 
of the exile system would be inadequate. The very 
word " Siberia " has deeply impressed itself upon 
the popular imagination. For the people of Rus- 
sia it is associated with some of the saddest as- 
pects of their national life ; for the world in general, 
especially for literature, it has become a synonym 
for the suppression of free thought and the punish- 
ment, not only of political, but also of religious 
aspirations. Yet it is only in relation to the exile 
system, and to the practice of banishing men and 
women to the extreme northern areas of the Asian 
continent, that Siberia is correctly described as a 
forbidding waste, where the exile must drag out 
the brief day of his monotonous existence either in 
the utter absence of human companionship, other 
than that of his fellow exiles, or in regions within 
the arctic circle inhabited only by the aborigine 
nomads of the far north. In its southern areas, 
Siberia is a country of delightful climate, of ex- 
ceedingly fertile soil, as well as of resources, 



202 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

mineral and agricultural, which have scarcely yet 
been touched. With great and numerous water- 
ways traversing it in all directions, and with its 
growing lines of railway, the most important of 
which — that connecting Europe with the Chinese 
coast — is now approaching completion, Asiatic 
Russia promises to play a part in the world's trade 
the magnitude of which is yet far from being fully 
realized. The enormous extent of the country — 
into which, by the way, the whole of the United 
States and the non-Russian countries of Europe 
could be placed, along with another territory as 
large as France, without using up the available 
space — will make of Siberia, for centuries to 
come, a more than ample as well as appropriate 
outlet for the surplus populations of European 
Russia. 

The first mention of this vast continent in con- 
nection with the Russian punitive system dates as 
far back as the reign of Alexei Mikhail ovich. 
Exile to portions of it for colonizing purposes is 
mentioned as early as 1582, and account is given 
of the punitive banishment of 7400 persons in 
1622. But we do not get definite statements until 
the eighteenth century is reached. The first con- 
voy of exiled persons was forwarded to the penin- 
sula of Kamchatka in 1709, two years after the 
region had become Russian territory. That con- 



SIBEEIA AND THE EXILE SYSTEM 203 

voy originally contained some 14,000 persons, 
mainly prisoners of war taken by Peter the Great 
in his campaign against the Swedes ; but owing to 
the hardships met with, a large number of the 
party died before reaching their destination. The 
exile system which thus had its beginnings in the 
necessities of war was soon utilized for the pur- 
poses of civil administration. In 1762 the owners 
of serfs in European Eussia, the village com- 
munes, as well as individual landowners, were by 
formal ukaz permitted to send their troublesome 
slaves into northern Asia. The opening of the 
silver mines of Siberia in the eighteenth century 
produced a demand for labor which the authorities 
proceeded to satisfy by transferring thither a large 
number of prisoners who had not yet served out 
their sentences in the jails of European Eussia. 
As the Eussian punitive system developed, more- 
over, it became the custom to banish not only per- 
sons accused of the graver crimes, but also men and 
women charged with trivial offenses, until finally 
Siberia came to be regarded as a convenient desti- 
nation for all who, for one reason or another, on 
one pretext or another, had become obnoxious to the 
authorities. The use of the territory as a place of 
banishment for political offenders began with the 
earliest manifestations of political conspiracy in 
Eussia, and it is the treatment of such offenders 



204 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

— the circumstances of their arrest, transfer, and 
punishment, rather than the custom of banish- 
ment for ordinary crimes — which has attracted 
the attention of the world to what has become so 
widely known as " Siberian exile." 

For a century or more the method of dealing 
with convicts who had been sentenced to Siberia 
was crude in the extreme. No pains seem to have 
been taken to preserve the identity of the prisoners, 
or to make it certain that an accused person would 
serve out the sentence imposed by a court or fixed 
administratively by the Minister of the Interior. 
Prisoners could exchange names and sentences at 
will ; men convicted of serious crimes were some- 
times released after a few months' detention, while 
offenders whose delinquency had been trivial were 
kept for years at hard labor in the mines. The 
journey to Siberia had to be performed, moreover, 
on foot ; the members of the marching party wore 
leg fetters, and were accompanied by guards under 
orders to punish serious insubordination or the 
effort to escape with death. The exiles usually 
set out from some large city of European Russia, 
such as Moscow ; passing over the Urals, and halt- 
ing only at the famous boundary post, the farewell 
scenes at which have been so vividly depicted by 
the Polish painter Alexander Sochaczewski, they 
gradually proceeded by successive stages along the 



SIBERIA AND THE EXILE SYSTEM 205 

roads leading to Siberia. Thrown upon the public 
for subsistence, the party literally begged its way 
from one provincial city to another, the first indi- 
cation of its approach being the miloserdnaya, or 
" exiles' begging song," in which the convicts ap- 
pealed for assistance : — 

For the sake of Christ, 
Have pity on us, O our fathers ! 
Don't forget the unwilling travelers — 
Don't forget the long imprisoned ! 
Feed us, O our fathers, help us ! 
Feed us, help the poor and needy ! 

The systematization and improvement of Sibe- 
rian exile seem to have begun in 1754 in the 
reign of Elizabeth, a year after that monarch, 
having abolished capital punishment in her domin- 
ions, substituted therefor exile to the more north- 
ern parts of Asiatic Eussia. Towards the end of 
the eighteenth century Paul expended 100,000 
rubles for the erection of convict settlements for 
10,000 persons in the Zabaikal. In 1811 an 
armed guard was organized to accompany parties 
of exiles to Siberia, and the convicts were thence- 
forward provided with documents showing their 
identity ; in 1822 new regulations suggested by 
the census of 1819 were introduced, and these 
underwent further improvement in 1840, when 
Siberian exile was brought into general harmony 



206 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

with the penal code of the empire. The system of 
etape, or exile houses, erected at intervals along 
the principal roads, went into effect in the year 
1817. In 1823 the existing bureau of exile ad- 
ministration was established at Tobolsk, — an in- 
stitution which, since removed to Tiumen, there 
keeps a record of all convicts exiled, besides ex- 
ercising a supervision over their transportation 
and distribution through Siberia. 

In its modern form, as described by Mr. Kennan 
and others, the system takes cognizance of four 
classes of exiles. There are first the " hard-labor " 
convicts — men and women punished for the graver 
crimes, including political offenses — who, in ad- 
dition to exile, which is for life, lose all their civil 
rights. Next come the " penal colonists," offenders 
whose crimes, though less serious, suffice to deprive 
them of civil rights. The third class is consti- 
tuted of the simple exiles, who do not lose all their 
civil rights by banishment; while the fourth is 
made up of the women and children who volun- 
tarily follow their relatives into exile. The con- 
victs of the first two classes go to Siberia in 
fetters, with one side of the head shaved, and re- 
main there for life ; the members of the third 
class are at liberty, on the expiration of their 
term of banishment, to return to European Rus- 
sia. They include persons banished by the village 



SIBERIA AND THE EXILE SYSTEM 207 

communes, or by order of the Minister of the In- 
terior, or by the sentence of a court, as well as 
persons who have lost their passports, or vagrants 
who refuse to give their real names. 

Three centuries were allowed to elapse before 
records of the Siberian system began to be pre- 
served. Between 1807 and 1813 the deportations 
numbered 2000 yearly; between 1814 and 1847 
they averaged from 3000 to 8000; while from 
1853 to 1863 the average number was 10,000. 
In 1876 there were 19,000 exiles in Siberia; in 
1882 the number had fallen to 16,000. Between 
1823 and 1887, as recorded by the Exile Bureau 
of Tobolsk, no fewer than 772,979 persons were 
transported to the Asiatic possessions of Eussia. 
In 1896, as shown by the report of the Kussian 
prison administration, 9628 men and 540 women 
were banished to Siberia, while 744 men and 871 
women voluntarily followed their relatives into 
exile. In the same year, for transportation to 
Siberia, 17,013 prisoners reached the prison of 
Tiumen, whence they were distributed to different 
parts of the north Asiatic continent. The most 
recent reports from the island of Sakhalin show 
that on January 1, 1896, it contained a population 
of 6703 hard-labor convicts and 8433 released 
convicts and exiles, in addition to 2838 free 
settlers and 1323 women who, with about 4768 



208 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

children, had voluntarily followed their husbands 
into exile. The number of voluntary exiles — 
mainly wives and children — reached 54,900 be- 
tween the years 1823 and 1880; in 1876, 3000 
women thus shared the fate of their husbands ; in 
the year 1885, as stated by Mr. Kennan, 5536 
wives and children, out of a total of 15,766, were 
voluntary exiles. According to such authorities 
as Maksimov and Yadrintsev, the total number of 
persons exiled to Siberia between 1754 and 1899 
was 1,450,000. 

It is also to be noted that a certain proportion 
of the persons exiled to Siberia in the first and 
second classes — and of these probably one per 
cent are political offenders — are thus punished 
not by the sentence of a court, but by " adminis- 
trative process," as it is called in Russia — in 
other words, by the simple order of the Minister 
of the Interior. Between 1827 and 1846, 79,909 
persons were exiled to Siberia without preliminary 
trial. The report of a prison commission ap- 
pointed by Alexander II. in the seventies showed 
that an average of 45.6 per cent of all the exiles 
then in Siberia had been sentenced by a court, 
while 54.4 per cent had been exiled by administra- 
tive process ; the number of administrative exiles 
between 1867 and 1876 was 78,686. According 
to a later report, the political offenders banished 



SIBERIA AND THE EXILE SYSTEM 209 

by simple order from 1879 to 1884 numbered 749, 
showing a rate of about 125 each year. The num- 
ber of persons administratively exiled in 1896 was 
1699. At the present time about 6000 persons 
are banished every year without trial, and are fol- 
lowed into exile by about 4000 wives and children. 1 
The evils of the Siberian system begin with the 
crowding of the exiles into the prisons of European 
Russia in such cities as Moscow, Nizhny-Novgorod, 
Kazan, and Perm. There is next the injury the 
convicts suffer during the process of their trans- 
portation from Europe to their destination in Asia. 
In recent years it has been possible to lessen the 
hardships of transportation, and this has been 
done by the substitution for the journey on foot 
of railway trains through portions of the land 
route, and of barges where rivers facilitate the 
journey. Thus convicts may travel from Kazan 
to Tiumen either by rail or water. Having jour- 
neyed by steamer from Nizhny-Novgorod to Perm, 
a distance of nearly a thousand miles, they go by 
rail over the Urals to Ekaterinburg and Tiume*n. 
Here they remain for two weeks or more in the 
Tiumen forwarding prison, and are then trans- 
ported in convict barges via the rivers Irtish and 
Ob, as far as Tomsk, for distribution thence on 

1 See article on " The Siberian Exile System " in Busskoe Bog- 
dtstvo for April, 1900. 



210 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

foot to their various destinations. The exiles thus 
escape, for parts of the route, the former hardships 
of the inarching party, as well as the filth and dis- 
ease of the etape house ; yet the immunity is more 
than made up to them by their experiences in the 
convict barge, with its stifling atmosphere and 
unsanitary conditions, and in the overcrowded, 
germ-laden forwarding prison ; while those who go 
beyond Tomsk have still to run the gauntlet of the 
etape system for hundreds of miles into the for- 
bidding regions of eastern Siberia. 

The first Siberian prison encountered by the 
exiles who cross the Urals and proceed along the 
route described above is the forwarding prison in 
Tiumen, through which pass all persons banished 
to Asiatic Russia. The condition of this prison, 
which has since undergone but little improvement, 
may be gathered from the fact that in the years 
between 1876 and 1886 inclusive, the inmates were 
dying at the rate of 300 a year, the death rate 
varying from 23.7 per cent in 1882 to 44.1 in 
1879. Visiting it in 1885, Mr. Kennan found 
1800 people crowded into a building made to hold 
only 800. Some of the cells contained more than 
four times the number they were built to receive. 
The prisoners slept at night head to head on " the 
foul, muddy floors " in un ventilated wards whose 
air " had apparently been respired over and over 



SIBERIA AND THE EXILE SYSTEM 211 

again until it did not contain an atom of oxygen ; 
it was laden with fever germs from the unventi- 
lated hospital wards, fetid odors from diseased 
human lungs and unclean human bodies, and the 
stench arising from unemptied excrement buckets 
at the ends of the corridors." " It was," says Mr. 
Kennan, " like trying to breathe in an underground 
hospital drain." 

What next becomes of the convicts who pass 
alive through the Tiume'n forwarding prison? 
They are put on board barges for transportation 
to Tomsk. At the beginning of its journey, Mr. 
Kennan found one of these vessels, after fumiga- 
tion, in good condition for its work, but when it 
had discharged its human load, the barge suggested 
to him "a recently vacated wild beast cage in a 
menagerie. It was no more dirty," he says, " than 
might have been expected ; but its atmosphere 
was heavy with a strong animal odor ; its floors 
were covered with dried mud, into which had been 
trodden refuse scraps of food ; its nari, or sleeping 
benches, were black and greasy, and strewn with 
bits of dirty paper; and in the gray light of a 
cloudy day its dark Jcameras, with their small 
grated portholes, muddy floors, and polluted 
ammoniacal atmosphere, chilled and depressed me 
with suggestions of human misery." Since this 
description was written, there has been a gradual 



212 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

improvement in the condition of the barges, but 
the records remain, and they show that from 1870 
to 1884 inclusive, out of 148,489 carried between 
Tiumen and Tomsk 7066 were taken sick and 569 
died. 

But now comes the Dantean hell of the forward- 
ing prison at Tomsk. When Mr. Kennan in- 
spected it in 1885, it contained over 3000 prison- 
ers, though designed to hold only 1400. One 
Jcamera he entered was polluted to the last degree 
by over-respiration, and the men had to lie down 
in the mud and filth which, in rainy weather, the 
prisoners brought in on their shoes. The balagdny, 
or family kamery, were " literally packed with 
hundreds of weary-eyed men, haggard women, and 
wailing children, sitting or lying in all conceivable 
attitudes upon two long lines of rough plank sleep- 
ing benches," forming " a chaos of disorder and 
misery " in which, amid " air insufferably fetid," 
"hundreds of human beings, packed so closely 
together that they could not move without touch- 
ing one another, were trying to exist, and to per- 
form the necessary duties of life." The cases of 
sickness for the year in this prison numbered 2400, 
and there were 450 patients in the prison hospital 
at one time, with beds for only 150. 

From Tomsk the exiles are distributed to their 
destinations. For this purpose, marching parties, 



SIBERIA AND THE EXILE SYSTEM 213 

300 to 400 in each, made up every week, travel 
from Tomsk to Irkutsk, a distance of 1040 miles, 
and spend about three months on the road. In 
summer the convicts are dressed in gray-cloth suits, 
including a long overcoat in the back of which is 
stitched a diamond of black or yellow, and have 
ankle-guards to prevent the leg fetters from chaf- 
ing. The common and the political offenders are 
not distinguished, save in the matter of government 
allowance and method of transportation ; the ordi- 
nary convicts march on foot, and receive five cents 
a day for their subsistence ; the politicals who are 
also nobles, or belong to the privileged classes, are 
carried in carts, and receive seven and a half cents 
a day. On the march, the ordinary convicts take 
the lead; closely following them come vehicles 
filled with the sick and infirm of the party ; to 
these succeed the " politicals " also in carts ; then 
wagons with baggage in gray linen bags, the rear- 
guard of soldiers, and finally the chief officer of 
the convoy. 

The road traveled is called the etape road, from 
the fact that at intervals of from twenty-five to 
forty miles there are exile station houses, where the 
prisoners rest, and where a military guard kept 
there for the purpose relieves the guard of the ar- 
riving party. Midway between the etape houses 
are polu-etapes, or halfway houses, so arranged with 



214 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

reference to the etape houses that a temporary 
place of rest and shelter is provided every night 
for the party on the march, which is also allowed 
twenty-four hours rest every third, day on its arri- 
val at the etape house proper. The etapes and 
polu-etapes are alike inadequate for the reception 
of the parties which are constantly crowded into 
them ; they have been described by General 
Anuchin, the governor general of eastern Siberia, 
in his report to the Tsar, as " particularly bad " — 
as " tumble-down buildings in bad sanitary condi- 
tion, cold in winter, saturated with miasma, and 
offering very little security against escapes." Much 
disorder and demoralization used to result from 
the practice of sending unmarried men and un- 
married women with the marching parties of con- 
victs accompanied by their wives and children. 
Since 1883 an effort has been made to remove this 
source of evil by forwarding unmarried male pris- 
oners in separate convoys, and allowing unmarried 
women to travel in the family parties. But the 
demoralization has not altogether ceased ; and the 
stories of political exiles, as well as of exiled women, 
— many of whom are banished merely for the offense 
of having lost their passports 1 — show that it 

1 A fact emphasized by Tolst<5y in his latest story, Resurrection, 
which contains a sympathetic description of a party of " polit- 
icals " exiled to Siberia. 



SIBERIA AND THE EXILE SYSTEM 215 

frequently has its source in the military convoy. 
Meanwhile, the hardships of the road itself affect 
both sexes impartially. The clothes provided by the 
government give no sufficient protection against in- 
clemencies of weather. The boots of the prisoners, 
expected to last for six weeks, are of such poor 
quality, owing to official fraud, that they often 
become worthless in a couple of days, and the 
loser has to continue his march barefooted through 
" mud whose temperature is little above freezing 
point." Many of the convicts, drenched to the 
skin by rain, become sick, and linger for months 
in the etape hospitals without proper medical care. 
In 1883 seventy exiles died during a journey of 
twenty-one days between Tomsk and Achinsk. 
The report for 1885, made by Mr. Galkin Wrass- 
koy, chief of the prison administration, showed 
that the lazarets between Achinsk and Irkutsk 
were without nurses, hospital linen, beds, bedding, 
and dishes for food, and provided no separation 
according to age, sex, or nature of disease. 

The destination of the hard-labor convicts who 
thus set out for Tomsk in the marching parties is 
to a large extent the territory beyond Lake Baikal, 
and particularly the mining settlements known 
respectively by the names of Kard and Nerchinsk. 
The Silver Mines of Nerchinsk is the title given 
to an extensive district bordering on the rivers 



216 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

Shilka and Argun. Since 1863, when many 
Polish conspirators were banished to this region, 
the mines have been recruited from the ordinary 
convict populations of European Kussia; and 
though once notorious in Siberian exile literature, 
they have come to attract attention less on account 
of hardship in the mines than by reason of unsani- 
tary conditions in the adjoining prisons. The 
chief modern interest in the Siberian mines centres 
in the region of Kara, — a name given to a district 
which contains mines, prisons, and convict settle- 
ments. The mines consist of a number of gold 
placers situated at intervals along the banks of the 
Kara Eiver, and are worked — for the benefit of 
the Tsar, who regards their yield as his private 
property — by some 2000 convicts. Half of these, 
at the time of Mr. Kennan's visit, were kept in 
the prisons ; the rest lived in barracks, or occupied 
cabins of their own in the " open." The convict 
arriving at Kara is at first subjected to rigid disci- 
pline. The prison is his home, and he is marched 
from it each day under guard ; to it, after his 
work in the mines, he marches every night. But 
by good conduct, he may acquire the right to re- 
lease from the prison into what is called the " free 
command." He still remains a prisoner, but he 
can now either live in barracks with other convicts, 
or reside with his family in a separate cabin ; he is 



SIBERIA AND THE EXILE SYSTEM 217 

free, moreover, to dispose of his leisure time. 
Continuing to give satisfaction to the authorities, 
he is finally permitted to leave the mines altogether, 
and to settle in some part of Siberia as a " forced 
colonist," with the privilege of living like a farmer 
and cultivating a patch of land. 

The evils of convict life at Kara, as at Ner- 
chinsk, seem to be less referable to the actual 
work exacted at the mines than due to the condi- 
tion of the prisons, the kamery of which, being 
usually overcrowded, abound in disease germs, 
and, not to speak of personal discomfort, cause 
a high rate of sickness and death among the 
occupants. Much of the interest in Kara has 
been aroused by the personal history of many of 
the political offenders who have been sent thither 
as well as by the treatment accorded to them 
at the hands of prison officials. It is here that 
the punishment of chaining men to the wheel- 
barrows which they use in their work has been 
frequently inflicted; here where both men and 
women have been flogged for insubordination, in 
some cases so severely that the punishment has 
been followed in a short time by death ; here also 
where the " politicals " have joined in " hunger 
strikes" as the only means left them of protest 
against the cruelties of the prison authorities; 
and here that political offenders have gone mad, 



218 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

or committed suicide, as a means of avoiding in- 
sanity. 

The lot of persons sent into ordinary banish- 
ment, not involving a period of detention in 
prison, is much more bearable ; yet even upon 
these serious grievances are sometimes inflicted. 
Such convicts, being assigned to " definite places 
of residence," there come under that peculiar form 
of police surveillance which is one of the chief 
features of the Russian administrative process. 
The place of exile differs according to the gravity 
of the alleged offence, or the purpose of the Min- 
ister of the Interior. It may be some large city 
of Siberia, where civilized society exists, such as 
Semipalatinsk, Tomsk, or even Irkutsk ; or it may 
be some remote village or settlement within the 
arctic circle, where there is no society save that 
of the nomads. On the exile arriving at his des- 
tination he comes under rules of exile and police 
surveillance which expressly state that these are 
not punishments for crimes already committed, but 
measures of precaution to prevent crimes which 
the evil-minded may have in contemplation. The 
code confines the exile within certain limits ; it 
compels him to report regularly to the police ; it 
places his correspondence under their control, and 
provides that officers may visit his residence when- 
ever it may be deemed necessary. To the dif- 



SIBERIA AND THE EXILE SYSTEM 219 

ficulty of finding lodgings under such circum- 
stances is added the problem of earning a living. 
The allowance made by the government — six 
rubles, or three dollars a month — is too small to 
enable him to subsist ; he finds himself therefore 
compelled to seek some means of adding to his 
income. But here the interfering code imposes 
so many limitations upon his activity — forbidding 
to him everything in the nature of professional 
employment — that the political exile, always an 
educated man, is usually doomed — save in the 
rare cases in which the regulations are relaxed in 
his behalf by a humane official — either to starve 
or to eke out his living by resort to some humili- 
ating form of labor. 

Many distinguished men, either by work in the 
mines or by ordinary banishment, have expiated 
their offences against the Russian government by 
exile to Siberia. One of the earliest of them was 
Kryzhanich, the publicist, who was exiled to To- 
bolsk in 1661, and served out a sentence of six- 
teen years. At the end of the eighteenth century 
the government of Catherine the Great banished 
Radishchev, the earliest of the Russian political 
reformers, for a term of ten years. The first con- 
siderable batch of political offenders were exiled 
to Siberia as a result of the insurrection of the 
u Decembrists " in 1825. Some thirty of them, 



220 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

including Trubetskoy, the nominal leader, Wol- 
khonsky, Muraviev, and others, lived for a time 
at Chita in two log houses which still exist ; one 
of them, strangely enough, has been used up to 
recent times as a rendezvous for modern political 
exiles banished to this part of Siberia. The life 
of the thirty, and of those who, at first confiDed 
on the island of Aland, and in the fortress of 
Schliisselburg, subsequently joined them on the 
completion of a new prison for which they them- 
selves had dug the foundations, has been described 
by Baron Kosen, one of the number, in his " Rus- 
sian Conspirators in Siberia." It was in con- 
nection with the exile of the " Decembrists " that 
the custom of permitting women to follow their 
husbands into banishment was set up, though the 
honor of initiating it belongs to Catherine, the 
wife of Trubetskoy, as well as, in a less degree, 
to the Princess Maria Wolkhonsky. The heroism 
displayed by these two women in the course of 
their long and painful journey to the mines has 
been immortalized by Nekr&sov in his poem, 
" Russian Women." 

Among the more recent cases of banishment 
which have attracted world-wide attention is that 
of the famous novelist DostoyeVsky. According 
to the story of a fellow prisoner, one Rozhnovsky, 
who published his narrative in the Tiflis " Kav- 



SIBERIA AND THE EXILE SYSTEM 221 

kaz," DostoyeVsky was twice flogged by the prison 
authorities at Omsk. On the first occasion he 
was punished for having complained, on behalf of 
other prisoners, of a lump of filth found in their 
soup. The second time his offence was that of 
persisting, in defiance of an officer's orders to the 
contrary, in saving a fellow prisoner from drown- 
ing. The novelist was brutally beaten on both 
occasions ; after the second flogging he had to be 
removed to the hospital, emerging from it only to 
receive from the other convicts, who regarded him 
as dead, the epithet of "deceased." Another 
literary man punished for his writings was Nicholai 
Gavrilovich Chernishe*vsky, concerning whom the 
report was spread that he had been chained to 
the walls of a mine and flogged. Chernishevsky 
was exiled in 1864 on account of articles pub- 
lished by him in the " Contemporary," among 
them being a criticism of John Stuart Mill's work 
on " Political Economy." His original sentence 
of fourteen years' hard labor in the mines was 
commuted to seven, with subsequent exile for 
life. From 1864 to 1871 Chernishevsky lived at 
a station in the Zabaikal province of eastern 
Siberia as a hard-labor convict. On the expi- 
ration of the hard-labor period in 1871, he was 
formally named a " penal colonist," the town of 
Viluisk being designated as his place of residence. 



222 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

He remained there till 1883, when the govern- 
ment permitted him to return to European Russia. 
He was seen at Astrakhan in that year by the 
writer, to whom he communicated some of his ex- 
periences in exile. During his stay at Yiluisk, the 
government allowed him 200 rubles a year for his 
subsistence — a sum ample, having regard to the 
cost of living in that part of Siberia. Speaking on 
the subject of his treatment by the authorities, 
Chernishevsky denied that he had ever been in 
the mines, but admitted that he was put in chains 
■ — " perhaps a week." " But that," he continued, 
" was done by some agents of the government who 
had misunderstood my real relations with the au- 
thorities. When the government came to hear of 
it, they gave orders that it should not be repeated. 
That episode excepted, I was always treated by 
the agents of the government as respectfully as 
any man living could desire. My treatment was 
throughout not that of a convict, but that of a 
prisoner of war. The hard labor of which I have 
spoken was for me, as well as for many of the 
Russian and Polish political exiles among whom 
my lot was cast, a name only — it existed on paper, 
but had no reality." 

As a set-off against testimonies of this sort — 
given by a man completely in the power of the 
government whose actions he seems to condone — 



SIBERIA AND THE EXILE SYSTEM 223 

may be cited the statements of more humble vic- 
tims of the Siberian system, even if, for obvious 
reasons, they do not always come to us with the 
name of the writer attached. " When our march- 
ing party left Tomsk," writes an exile banished 
in 1882 for " political untrustworthiness,' , " a 
snowstorm began. The roads were in a dreadful 
condition. Many of the party, chiefly women, 
fainted away or went into hysterics ; several chil- 
dren died in their mothers' laps from the cold. 
In the etape station it was almost impossible to 
breathe. The sleeping planks were dirty, and the 
walls covered with vermin. . . . For weeks we 
traveled through all sorts of privations and fa- 
tigues, several falling ill, and others dying on 
the way. The wife of the banished doctor Byely, 
who was going to join her husband, went mad in 
consequence of the hardships and the inhuman treat- 
ment of the soldiers." Another exile, kept in the 
Yakutsk prison about the same time, wrote : " We 
live literally in the dark, and have only from one 
and a half to two hours of light in which to eat. 
We have no bread, but only fish. My ailment is 
getting worse. I have no more hope of ever see- 
ing the sun again. We work from six in the 
morning till eight in the evening, in ice-cold 
water, which frequently rises up to our knees. 
When we reach our cells at night we are utterly 



224 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

exhausted. . . . We need everything — books, 
linen, shoes, and money. Our torments are 
frightful ; if we could only have an hour in the 
open air we should be satisfied." A few lines may 
be added from the mines at Kara : " A few days 
ago the soldiers beat Miss Armfeld with the butt 
ends of their muskets for insubordination. . . . 
Rods and knuts come often into use here. . . . 
Zhutin died the other day in chains bound to 
the wall. Kolenkin is dying of his wounds, which 
are being torn open by his fetters. Semenovsky 
has shot himself ; Rudin has poisoned himself 
with matches. We have to carry our fetters not 
only during working hours, but also in our cells. 
... So we live, on a diet of black bread, in a 
cold, damp, and suffocating atmosphere, continu- 
ally threatened with bayonets and the butt ends 
of muskets, and only kept alive by a single hope 
— that of being able to return home and see once 
again those near and dear to us." * 

In recent years various circumstances have con- 
tributed to lessen the faith of the Russian govern- 
ment in the Siberian exile system. One of these 
is the increasing cost at which it has had to be 

1 First published in the Russian revolutionary organs. For the 
fullest official confirmation of charges made by political exiles 
concerning the hardships of itape life and the condition of Siberian 
prisons, see many Russian magazine articles, also special articles 
and report in The Russian Law Messenger. 



SIBERIA AND THE EXILE SYSTEM 225 

carried on, and the growing difficulty of ade- 
quately administering the system from so great a 
distance as St. Petersburg. The fraud and cor- 
ruption inseparable from the system ; the suffering 
resulting from official cruelty, as well as from the 
hardships of transportation ; the excessive sick 
and death rate in the prisons and settlements ; the 
demoralization incident to the non-separation of 
the sexes, to the constant escape of convicts, and 
to the practice of "man-hunting," degenerating 
into wholesale murder under the incitement of 
official rewards offered for their recapture — these 
accompaniments of the system have also had their 
weight with the Tsar and his advisers. A potent 
influence working for many decades against de- 
portation to Siberia has been the opposition — 
expressed in petitions innumerable — of the Si- 
berian populations to the continued settlement in 
their midst of ordinary convicts who, as " forced 
colonists," turned loose upon the community, 
commit as a rule two thirds of all the crimes for 
which Siberia is held responsible, and yet impose 
upon that same community the burden of their 
support. Mention must also be made of the new 
sensitiveness of the Russian administrative con- 
science to western opinion, 1 as well as of the con- 

1 An organ devoted to constitutional reform in Russia is regu- 
larly published in London, under the title of Free Russia, edited 
6y Felix Volkhovsky and J. F. Green. 



226 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

demnation which, with a few rare exceptions, the 
Siberian exile system has never ceased to receive, 
not only from Eussian officials themselves, but 
also from travelers, philanthropists, prison reform- 
ers, literary men, and all others who have the wel- 
fare of the race at heart. If, therefore, Eussian 
official announcements are to be depended upon, 
it must be regarded as a gain for humanity that 
the Tsar Nicholas II. has finally (May, 1900) 
sanctioned preliminary measures for the abolition 
of the system which in years past has added so 
much suffering to the preventable evil of the 
world. 



XII 

LANGUAGE AND LITEEATUEE 

In the development thus briefly described, the 
Russians have had the aid, first of a distinctive 
form of speech which, though hampered by cum- 
brous inflections, is yet of remarkable richness and 
flexibility; and next, of a native literature in 
which the thought, the tendencies, and aspirations 
of the people have found fitting and worthy ex- 
pression. The Eussians of to-day have two forms 
of language in use, — Great-Russian, the speech 
of literature and of daily intercourse, and Eccle- 
siastical Slavonic, the language of the church 
books. The spoken tongue is the developed or 
modern form of the language originally used by 
the Russian Slavs — that is to say, of a dialect 
closely related to what we now know as Old 
Bulgarian. The Ecclesiastical Slavonic of the 
church liturgies, being practically identical with 
Old Bulgarian, represents the language first util- 
ized for religious work among the Russian Slavs 
because of its close resemblance to their own 
tongue. The task of creating an alphabet which 



228 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

could be used by the Greek priests in their ministra- 
tions to the Russians was undertaken by the Greek 
missionary Cyrillus, after whom the script was 
called Cyrillic. The construction of the alphabet 
— founded, as it was, mainly on the Greek letters, 
but also containing signs borrowed from Hebrew, 
Kopt, and Armenian — made it possible for trans- 
lations of the Bible to be made into Old Bulgarian, 
and it was by means of these that the Scriptures 
were first made familiar in the Russian countries. 
Yet, as time went on, the spoken tongue diverged 
more and more from the language of the church 
books ; and to-day the Ecclesiastical Slavonic, 
originally more or less intelligible to Russians, is 
so utterly foreign to them, having itself under- 
gone certain alphabetic modifications, that it has 
to be acquired as a dead language even by the 
priests. 

How, then, came the strange characters which 
are used to-day in the printing of Russian news- 
papers and books — characters which bear only 
slight resemblance to the much more complex 
forms of Ecclesiastical Slavonic, and which look 
for all the world like a mixture of small capitals 
alternating with "lower-case" letters reversed? 
They are largely the result of the many-sided 
activity of Peter the Great himself. Finding the 
letters of the Cyrillic alphabet much too cum- 



LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 229 

brous for the purposes of the new culture, he de- 
termined (1708) to simplify them for civil use. 
Having himself designed the changes which he 
regarded as desirable, he had a sample set of let- 
ters constructed, and these he forwarded to Am- 
sterdam with an order for regular fonts of type 
in the new style. Soon afterwards a Dutch arti- 
san, Anton Demai by name, came to Russia with 
the sets of types arranged for by Peter. The ex- 
periment was successful enough, though its suc- 
cess was due, not to the autocratic power of the 
reformer, but rather to the fact that literature in 
Russia was not yet advanced and conservative 
enough to have stereotyped beyond recovery the 
alphabetic forms of the language in which it was 
written. The new type favored the "European- 
ization " movement, since it represented an effort, 
by the rejection of some letters and the re-fashion- 
ing of others, to approximate Ecclesiastical Sla- 
vonic to the Roman or Latin alphabet of western 
Europe. The forms which Peter devised were de- 
stined to undergo still further slight modifications ; 
yet they have remained to this day sufficiently 
strange and uncouth to constitute one of those 
obstacles to the complete assimilation of Russian 
with west-European culture which it was the aim 
of the reformer to remove. 

The grammatical structure of Russian is another 



230 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

feature of the language which makes it difficult 
of acquirement by foreigners accustomed only to 
the speech forms of the Germanic and Romance 
branches of Indo-European. Not only is the noun 
inflected, taking a special ending for nominative, 
genitive, dative, and accusative, — it has two addi- 
tional cases, the instrumental, meaning " by " or 
" through," and the prepositional, signifying " to," 
" on," " upon," etc. The verb, though not bur- 
dened with many irregular forms, never fails to 
test the patience of the student with its multipli- 
city of " aspects ; " before he can decide which of 
these to use, he must consider whether the action 
which he wishes to describe is of short duration, 
or habitual — whether it is " commencing," " con- 
tinuing," " completed," or is undergoing repetition. 
Particles put before the verb, such as za, raz, po, 
do, na, iz, modify its meaning in a way perplexing 
to the beginner, who is in danger of committing 
the most ludicrous malapropisms. The pronouns 
in Eussian have worked themselves free from the 
verb, yet they are frequently omitted, as in Gotov, 
" I am ready," and JVoch, " It was night," Eus- 
sian resembles Greek, but still more German, in 
its power to form long lists of composites, not only 
by carrying a root idea through all the parts of 
speech, but by using prefixes, infixes, and postfixes. 
Thus there are composites formed with the word 



LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 231 

slovo, " word," such as slovesnost, " literature ; " 
slovdr, " dictionary ; " slovny, " from a diction- 
ary ; " slovookhotlivost, " verbiage ; " slovouda- 
reniye, " prosody," etc. 

In its general features, Russian is wanting in 
those verbal resemblances which, for example, give 
such aid to a speaker of English in his efforts to 
acquire languages like German or French. In a 
few terms descriptive of family life, or of objects 
common to it, likeness is carried through two or 
more of the Indo-European languages. Thus mat, 
" mother," has analogies in Latin mater and Ger- 
man Mutter. Brat, "brother," resembles, not 
only the English equivalent, but also the Broder 
of Danish and Swedish. JSToch, " night," is from 
the same root as Latin nox (German JVachf). In 
other cases the likeness is confined to Latin, as in 
vidyet, " to see," resembling videre ; ogon, " fire " 
(ignis), and novy, "new" (novus) ; or to Greek, 
as in gora, " mountain " (opos') ; or to German, as 
in lyubov, "love" (Liebe). In the great bulk 
of Russian words, even when Grimm's law of 
consonantal interchange is called in to aid the 
inquirer, no resemblance can be discovered save in 
the case of a few foreign terms which have been 
incorporated into the language and provided with 
Russian endings. The language has methods of 
pronunciation which are far from being phonetic ; 



232 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

its accentuation of words is largely arbitrary and 
irregular. 

But it is not with the modern language, thus 
modified by the wear and tear of centuries, that 
the story of Eussian literature begins. The mass 
of the writings produced in the earlier period 
were committed to manuscript in Ecclesiastical 
Slavonic, which came only gradually to be mixed 
more or less with words borrowed from the speech 
of the people. It was in this church speech and 
in this early period that the monks wrote the chron- 
icles — the famous annals of Kiev, as well as the 
more local chronicles of Novgorod, Tver, Suzdal, 
Volhynia, and Pskov — documents of little literary 
but of priceless historical value — and that there 
came into being a voluminous ecclesiastical litera- 
ture, consisting mainly of sermons, " instructions," 
epistles, church histories, and religious hymns. 
There was meanwhile growing up a rich popular 
literature, which for centuries existed solely " in 
the mouths of the people." Part of it consisted 
of the magic formulae, incantations, and petition- 
ary sentences in which the ignorant peasant kept 
alive the memory of the heathen deities to whom 
he had so often appealed in his pagan past. There 
were also songs born of the emotions, suited to 
every mood of the mind, to every need of social 
entertainment, — songs for different seasons of the 



LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 233 

year, such as the Christian holyddy and the songs 
of the " round dance," symbolizing the movements 
of the sun ; songs sung at birth rejoicings and at 
marriage festivities ; finally, funeral songs. 

More important still were the hyliny, or epic 
songs, in which the untutored Russian imagination 
is seen in its highest form of productivity. The 
earlier of these songs show us how the Russians 
apotheosized the great nature forces of their environ- 
ment. They sing, for example, of the mountain 
giant, Svyatogor, who was so colossal that the 
earth could not carry him, and he had to lie across 
the mountains at full length. In other epic songs 
they describe the martyrdom of river heroes, who 
sacrifice themselves and their wives in order that, 
from their blood, the waters of the Don, the Dniepr, 
and other Russian streams may flow forth to bless 
the land. Or, personifying the land itself, as the 
Hindu personifies the objects on which his daily 
sustenance depends, they give heroic meaning to 
the occupation of agriculture in the conception of 
Mikula Selyaninovich, the sound of whose plough 
can be heard by the traveler at the distance of many 
days' journey. Then, as time went on, and the 
events of Russian history began to offer worthy 
materials of epic song, the byliny turned from 
the apotheosis of nature to the glorification of 
human exploits. Now came from these ruder 



234 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

trouvSres and troubadours of the northeast poetic 
compositions in praise of the nation's heroes. As 
recovered for literature by modern scholars like 
Kireyevsky and Rybnikov, these later epics in 
verse are found to form definite cycles, such as the 
cycle of Kiev, the cycle of Novgorod, the cycle of 
Moscow. They glorify warlike deeds, and tell of 
the achievements of the grand princes. Their fa- 
vorite heroes — Prince Vladimir and his knightly 
followers, Ilya of Murom, Dobrynya Nikitich, 
Alyosha Popovich, Mihailo Potok, Dyuk Stepano- 
vich, Churilo Plenkovich, and Solovdi Budimiro- 
vich — constitute a sort of " round table " of pala- 
dins whose duty it is to champion the cause of 
Russia against its pagan enemies. In one series 
of epic songs are celebrated the achievements of 
the Russian people in conflict with the Tatars ; 
another takes its material from the power and 
deeds of Ivan the Terrible. Often enough in these 
songs, fiction is mingled with the descriptions of 
real persons and events, while the so-called histori- 
cal byliny are as frequently modified by magical 
elements suggested by the superstitions of the time. 
One of the most perfect of the legendary epics, the 
" Slovo o Polku Igoreve " (Word Concerning the 
Campaign of Igor), describes the campaign of 
the Russians against the Polovtsy in 1185. Com- 
posed, according to Tikhonravov, somewhere be- 



LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 235 

tween the fourteenth and the sixteenth century, it 
is full of patriotic feeling, has many vivid descrip- 
tions of nature, and is remarkable, among other 
things, for the plaint of Igor's wife, Yaroslavna, 
who, apostrophizing the wind, blames it for favor- 
ing the arrows of the Khan, and then, addressing 
the Dniepr, commands it to bring her loved one 
home again. The song closes with this passage : 
" The sun shines in the heavens. The prince is 
in the Russian land. On the Dunai young girls 
have heard singing. The song brought by the 
waves of the sea finds its echo in Kiev. Igor 
arrives ; he enters at Buchev to consult the image 
of the Mother of God of Porogosh. Joy in the 
hamlets ! Joy in the cities ! Everybody sings 
and glorifies the princes together — first the elders, 
then the young. And we also sing. Glory to 
Igor Svyatoslavich, — to the impetuous aurochs 
Vsevolod, glory ! Glory to Vladimir, the falcon, 
son of Igor ! Health to the princes, to their 
druzhina, that valiantly fought for the Cross 
against the pagans! Glory to the princes and 
their druzhina ! Amen." All the songs, it must 
be remembered, existed originally only in an oral 
form, had to be transmitted from fathers to chil- 
dren, and were carried by professional singers 
in their wanderings to the remotest parts of the 
empire. 



236 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

Under the depressing influences of the Tatar 
invasion, which for the time put an end to all 
progress in popular culture, literature remained 
largely ecclesiastical in material as well as in tone 
throughout the Moscow period. To this period 
belongs the Church Code, an important document 
discussing the condition of Russia, and setting 
forth proposed reforms in the church ; a history 
of Ivan the Terrible, by the monarch's prime 
minister, Kurbsky, forming the first example of 
Russian historical writing, as well as a number 
of letters which passed between Kurbsky and the 
Tsar Ivan; and an account of the Tsardom of 
Kazan, by the priest Ivan Glazatsky; and the 
Domostroy, or " book of manners," compiled and 
perhaps also partly composed by the monk Syl- 
vester. The whole literature of this Moscow 
period, up to the middle of the sixteenth century, 
took the manuscript form, owing to the failure of 
the Russians to utilize the art of printing until 
more than a hundred years after its discovery in 
western Europe. The first printing office in Rus- 
sia was established at Moscow in 1563-64, under 
the patronage of Ivan IV. and the Metropolitan 
Makarius. But the people no sooner heard of its 
operations than an enraged mob, regarding them 
as due to sorcery, set the building on fire, and 
compelled the printers — Ivan Feodorov and 



LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 237 

Peter Timof eyev — to flee for their lives to Lithu- 
ania. Five years elapsed before a pupil of Feo- 
dorov founded a new printing office, from which 
were thereupon issued, first ecclesiastical books, — 
copies of the psalter, the Bible, liturgies, histories 
of the saints, — and then secular writings, includ- 
ing books of travel, and the earliest examples of 
fiction and story writing. 

The outbreak of the schism in the seventeenth 
century gave rise to a flood of a new form of 
church literature, most of it directed against the 
sects. The first oasis in this wilderness of polemic 
came with the secular writings of Yury Kryzanich. 
This author, through his efforts to rouse the Rus- 
sians to a consciousness of their solidarity with 
the other branches of the Slav stock, had the 
misfortune, at the very outset of his career, to be 
mistaken for an adventurer, and the government 
of Alexei Mikhailovich banished him to Tobolsk 
in 1661. It was in exile that he wrote " Poli- 
tics " — a work which, conceived in a thoroughly 
patriotic spirit, contained an exhaustive criticism 
of the Russian character and Russian conditions, 
together with suggestions for the amelioration of 
both. Kryzhanich, who had been educated in 
Vienna, Bologna, and Rome, also produced a Pan- 
slavic grammar, which attracted the attention of 
philologists. Another important secular writing 



233 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

of this period was Grigory Kotoshfkhin's account 
of Russia in the reign of Alexei Mikhailovich. 
Himself an official, the author did not hesitate to 
describe the evils of political and court life, as 
well as the corruption of judges and the cruelty 
practiced upon the serfs. The founding of the 
theatre in Russia during this reign did much to 
stimulate dramatic writing, though the first stage 
productions, composed by men like Simeon Polot- 
sky and Dmitry Rostovsky, were largely based on 
scriptural themes. 

The reign of Peter, while characterized by phe- 
nomenal activity in the country's institutional life, 
shows little creative work in the department of 
literature. The very richness of belles-lettres in 
western Europe, where the classic writers of Eng- 
land and France had just composed their chefs- 
d'oeuvre, could but serve to prolong in Russia 
those activities of absorption and imitation im- 
posed upon the national mind by secular condi- 
tions. We get therefore in this period an abun- 
dance of translations from the French, English, 
Dutch, and classical tongues — among them ver- 
sions of Moliere's " Le Medecin Malgre Lui " and 
"Les Precieuses Ridicules." Books on pedagogy 
and various technical subjects abound. Krekshin 
writes a history of Peter the Great, and Matve'yev 
an account of " The Insurrection of the Streltsy." 



LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 239 

The controversial writings of the time remind us 
that such men as Feofan Prokopovich, Archbishop 
of Kyazan, Gavril Buzhinsky, and the Hiero- 
monakh Simon Kokhanovsky, threw their influence 
on the side of the reforms. The most prominent 
and distinguished litterateur of Peter's reign was 
Ivan Tikhonovich Pososhkdv (1670-1726.) His 
attitude of hostility to the sectarians was out- 
spoken, nor did he scruple to side with the church 
against science in his denunciation of Copernicus 
as " a denier of God ; " but his book on " Poverty 
and Kiches," in which abuses of administration 
are severely handled, applied too rude a test to 
the tolerance of the authorities, for a year after 
issuing the work he was arrested and confined in 
the citadel of St. Petersburg, where he died. 
Perhaps the most promising sign of this period 
is the care which Peter, eager to ameliorate the 
material as well as the intellectual condition of 
his people, took to provide them with the best 
scientific thought of western Europe; and that 
he did this to some effect is suggested by the list 
of books which he caused to be translated into 
Russian — books which included the most im- 
portant writings of Hugo Grotius, Puffendorf, 
Arend, Comenius, Justus Lipsius, and Bernouilli ; 
Brinker's " Art of Shipbuilding ; " Hiibner's Geo- 
graphy, the astronomical and geographical works 



240 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

of Huygens and Kliiver, as well as, among classics, 
-ZEsop, Ovid, Curtius, etc. 

By far the most important literary event of 
Peter's reign was the contribution it yielded to 
the completion of a process of the most vital sig- 
nificance for the development of Kussian thought. 
This was the process which was to decide forever 
the function of Ecclesiastical Slavonic in the na- 
tional life, and was to end by giving the people, 
for the first time in their history, a literary dialect. 
Russia had now reached the last stages of the 
struggle between the church language and the 
tongue of the common people — between dying 
forms of speech about to become classic and a 
vigorous young language which, developed by 
and constantly reacting on the popular thought, 
had grown more and more adapted to the pur- 
poses of literary expression. Ecclesiastical Sla- 
vonic, as we have seen, was the sole instrument of 
the Eussian literary life in its earlier period ; but 
when we reach the time of Peter the Great we 
find a literature made up of compositions in which 
both forms of speech have been utilized — writings 
in which the language of the common people 
mingles with the language of the church books. 
It was bad enough to have to use such a combi- 
nation, amounting almost to a literary jargon, 
for the conveyance of thought; but the situation 



LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 241 

was rendered still more deplorable by the pre- 
vailing license, which permitted each author not 
only to decide largely for himself in the matter 
of grammatical rules, but also to reach an indi- 
vidual judgment in regard to the rival claims of 
the two languages. Upon him also depended the 
use or disuse of a mass of foreign words and 
phrases — Latin, English, German, and Dutch — 
brought into Russian at various times. Yet by 
far the most important issue of the day was the 
issue between the speech of the church and the 
language of the common people ; and the first 
successful effort to decide this issue in favor of 
the popular tongue was made by Lomonosov in 
the first half of the eighteenth century. It was 
he who not only formulated rules of Eussian 
grammar, but also, by defining the place of Eccle- 
siastical Slavonic in literary composition, secured 
a definite realm for the speech of the people. 
Other writers carried vigorously forward the re- 
form thus initiated; Ecclesiastical Slavonic con- 
tinued to be more and more relieved of its literary 
function until finally, under the influence and 
example of Pushkin, the Russ, rendered lingually 
homogeneous and purified of incongruous elements, 
took its place as the literary dialect of the Rus- 
sian people. 

Russian literature, in the true meaning of the 



242 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

term, really begins with the writings of the man 
who did so much to perfect his mother tongue as 
an instrument of literary expression. Nor is the 
story of Mikhail Vassilyevich Lomonosov (1712- 
65) wanting in romantic elements ; for though 
born the son of a poor Arkhangel fisherman, and 
taught the rudiments of education by a friend, the 
lad not only contrived to complete his training by 
courses in German universities, but also so im- 
proved his natural abilities with study as to be- 
come beyond all question the most ably endowed 
Kussian mind of his time. His acquirements in 
natural science, in several of the branches of which 
he was both teacher and experimenter, would 
alone have made him a commanding figure in 
the Eussian culture movement. And though his 
chief significance for that movement rests on his 
achievements in the domain of language, Lomo- 
nosov could not content himself with the gift to 
his countrymen of polished speech forms in which 
they could henceforth write literature. Himself 
a poet, and determined that, like the countries of 
western Europe, Eussia should also have poetry, 
he gave himself to the work of showing how it 
should be written. Bringing to his task a fine 
feeling for nature, early stimulated by the splen- 
dor of the northern heavens which had formed 
the canopy of his boyish occupations, Lomonosov 



LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 243 

wrote verse, especially lyric verse, with effects of 
great freshness and beauty. The new life he thus 
wrought for literature had its effect upon all his 
contemporaries. Among the best known of these 
was Tredyakovsky, who, besides translating ex- 
tensively from the French, made important criti- 
cal contributions to the theory of Russian verse ; 
Kantemir, son of a naturalized Greek, who pro- 
duced satires largely in imitation of the French 
school of pseudo-classicism ; Sumarokov, who wrote 
for the stage, following Corneille and Racine ; and 
Tatfshchev, who spent thirteen years in the pro- 
duction of a history of Russia. 

With Catherine the Great, Russian literature 
entered what has been called its golden age. The 
monarch's own ambitions as an author, her predi- 
lection for the Encyclopedists, her success in 
gathering around her many of the great men of 
her time, all combined to give the literary life of 
Russia at the close of the eighteenth century a 
brilliance which it had never before displayed. 
It was in this period, thirty-four years in duration, 
that Fon Vizin developed his powers as a writer 
of comedies ; that the famous court poet Derzha- 
vin, of Tatar descent, wrote the somewhat pom- 
pous odes for which he is best remembered ; and 
that Radishchev described the institution of serf- 
dom in a way to bring down upon him the wrath 



244 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

of Catherine and the punishment of her judges. 
Nor were lesser lights lacking in a reign which 
made literary pretensions a passport to all the 
forms of fashionable life — men like Petrov, com- 
poser of odes, and translator of Milton's Paradise 
Lost ; Feodor Emm, the story writer ; Geraskov, 
of Wallachian ancestry, author of narrative poems 
and dramas ; Bogdanovich, the Little-Eussian 
dramatist and comedy writer ; and Khemnitser, 
whose genius spent itself in fables in the style 
of Gellert and La Fontaine. The Empress her- 
self added considerably, in numerous comedies, 
poems, sketches, etc., — to say nothing of her 
achievements in the field of history and language, 
— to the literary yield of a period which, also, by 
the way, included the talented Princess Dashkov 
in the list of its women devoted to literature. It 
must, nevertheless, be admitted that, despite the 
brilliance of Catherine's salon and its surround- 
ings, Russia had yet to see the development of 
a national literature worthy of the name. The 
work of Russian writers was still largely imitative 
and foreign ; in too many cases, moreover, the 
conditions degraded literary production to the 
level of paid eulogy. 

The nineteenth century opened with the promise 
of better things. Its sufficient augury was Ka- 
ramzin, a man of many-sided literary endowment, 



LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 245 

whose classical " History of the Russian Empire," 
besides displaying a mastery of Russian style, 
presents the Russian language in its final stage of 
perfection as a literary tongue. KryloV, his con- 
temporary, though also a writer of odes, comedies, 
and operas, is best known as a writer of fables, in 
some 200 of which he successfully embodied the 
practical good sense, the humor, and also the pa- 
triotism of the common people. The famous cul- 
ture comedy " Sorrow from Brains," written by 
Griboyedov, also belongs to this period. But the 
pseudo-classicism which Russia had borrowed from 
the French was now passing away; and with 
Zhuk6vsky's conversion to the poetry of the ro- 
mantic legends, the minnesongs, and the popular 
ballads of the German middle ages, as expressed 
in the productions of Goethe and Schiller, Russian 
literature found itself carried powerfully in the 
direction of romanticism. Into that literature 
now came, with vivifying influence and creative 
power, the master spirit of the new movement, as 
well as the leading poet of Russia. 

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, born an aristo- 
crat, had the hot blood of the negro race flowing 
in his veins through descent on his mother's side 
from a native Abyssinian. Compared with the 
poems of Pushkin, the productions of the official 
litterateurs who had preceded him, — the odes 



246 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

and lyrics which, at the courts of at least two 
empresses, had been largely made to order, — 
were indeed " as moonlight unto sunlight, and as 
water unto wine." For well-nigh the first time in 
the history of the Russians, there was now a man 
among them who sang from stress of inward emo- 
tion, yet in whom the mechanism of literary ex- 
pression was so perfectly correlated with the 
sources of feeling and thought as to give his 
poetry that air of spontaneity and inspiration 
which Russian verse had hitherto lacked. To the 
elements of romanticism, as comprehended by Zhu- 
kovsky — mere delight in the past, taste for the 
wonderful, love of the magical and marvelous — 
Pushkin added the use of national materials ; and 
in writings like " The Fountain of Bakchiserai," a 
product of his sojourn in the Crimea, and " Ruslan 
and Ludmila," echoing the legends told him when 
a boy by his nurse, Pushkin opened the way for 
the exploitation of rich stores of material which had 
long been neglected. Under the stimulus of his- 
torical studies, inspired especially by the reading 
of Shakespeare, the poet composed the classic 
drama " Boris Godun6v," printed in 1831. Some 
of Pushkin's social experiences found expression 
in " Yevgeni Onyegin," a half-serious, half-satiri- 
cal narrative poem, suggested by Don Juan ; and 
here, in the character of Tatyana, the author has 



LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 247 

created one of the most attractive types of women 
to be found in Russian literature. 

But Russia could not long supply that aristo- 
cracy of genius which is essential to all supreme 
efforts in the realm of the creative imagination. 
The time was in fact approaching when the Rus- 
sian, like the west-European, mind would also direct 
its literary ambition into more democratic and 
more useful fields. For a while Lermontov — 
familiar with the Caucasus, first as a traveler, 
and then as an exile — maintained the traditions of 
the romantic school, and won undoubted fame as a 
poet. His lyrical verse, as well as his longer nar- 
rative poems, catch something of their color from 
experiences which had made him not only a scep- 
tic in religion, but also an irreconcilable opponent 
of the autocracy. Working constantly under the 
Byronic influence, he gave ample expression to 
that Weltschmerz which had by this time invaded 
all the higher thought of Russia. His most 
lengthy poetical composition was " The Demon," a 
poem of passion ; his chief prose work, " A Hero 
of our Time," contains the absorbing adventures 
of a Byronesque hero, Pechorin, whose story is 
narrated by himself in the form of a diary. There 
is much pessimism in Lermontov's writings, yet 
they are always touched by the tender melancholy 
with which the poet knew how to make even his 
moods of profoundest dejection fascinating. 



248 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

The transition from romanticism in Eussia was 
neither difficult nor prolonged ; for realism had 
been a latent tendency in Eussian literature since 
the beginning of the century. Yet its sudden 
development in G6gol wrought a change in the 
whole art and practice of literature. It was not 
only that Eussian writers ceased from their imi- 
tative subservience to foreign models, — a new 
view of the function of literature asserted itself. 
Under the stimulus of modern scientific knowledge, 
as well as of the philosophical discussions of the 
forties, Eussian writers, from dealing with subjects 
of fanciful, imaginative, and theoretical interest, 
now began to occupy themselves with questions 
affecting the welfare of the individual and the 
race. From the thought of the perfection of man 
and society, they passed naturally enough to the 
consideration of national problems, and did their 
utmost, not only to emphasize the evils which they 
recognized, but also — so far as a rigorous censor- 
ship would permit — to suggest means of amelio- 
ration. Hence it was that since Gogol wrote his 
" Eevisor " and " Dead Souls " — works in which 
with a laughing face, from which tears are flowing, 
the novelist began again, a long way after Eadi- 
shchev, the attack upon remediable Eussian condi- 
tions, Eussian literature has never wholly or for 
long left the field of sociological problems. The 



LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 249 

lash was also wielded by Saltykov, whose satire 
condensed itself so successfully in " Government 
Sketches," " Pompadury i Pompadurshi," " The 
Tashkendians," and " The Letters to My Aunt." 
Another writer who strove in behalf of the enslaved 
peasants was the poet Nekrasov — a man who, near 
to the people, knew their life intimately, and never 
tired of depicting it in musical, heart-moving 
verse. The genius of Dostoye*vsky also gave itself 
to social questions — healthily enough in "Poor 
People," which tells the story of the city proletariat 
in a way to arouse sympathy with a whole class ; 
more morbidly, yet more powerfully, in " Crime 
and Punishment," where a peculiarly horrible 
murder is made the text of a highly questionable 
theory of individual regeneration. Goncharov's 
" Oblomov " takes its name from the hero of the 
story, in whose faculty for the elaboration of great 
schemes which he has not the executive energy to 
carry to realization Russians have very generally 
recognized one of their racial failings. In Cher- 
nisheVsky's " What 's to be Done ? " we find a 
publicist, critic, and political economist formulating 
a plan of industrial reform in the guise of a love 
story. The comedies of Ostrovsky showed an in- 
timate knowledge of the Russian merchant of the 
old type, with its rigid adherence to the Orthodox 
faith, and its strict family life of the Domostroy 



250 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

period. Finally, the Nihilistic or revolutionary 
movement not only supplied the motive of some 
of the finest of Tourgueneff's stories — among 
them "Fathers and Children," "Virgin Soil," 
and " Smoke " — but also called into being Do- 
stoyevsky's " Demons," Goncharov's " Precipice," 
and Pisemsky's " Troubled Sea." 

Tourgueneff: is one of the few Russian writers 
who have gained a world-wide reputation. Though 
a poet, as well as a novel-writer, his best work has 
been done in the field of the romance. Here the 
artistic motive predominates ; the writer is sparing 
of words, and has a way of compressing his thought 
into small compass which reminds one of impres- 
sionism. All his books are condensed, and each 
may be perused at a single sitting ; the style, 
moreover, is one of exquisite literary finish. The 
charm of Tourgueneff's women types has been 
widely admired. Some of his novels are absorb- 
ing descriptions of family life, such as " A Nest of 
Gentlemen," " On the Eve," " First Love," etc. 
In another class of stories the novelist describes 
the social and political conditions of Russian life 
in the fifties and sixties. The most famous of 
them, " Fathers and Children " (1861), contains 
the sketch of a revolutionary type, Bazarov, which 
the Russian liberals generally condemned as a 
caricature of their tendencies and aspirations, 



LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 251 

though by the more radical fraction Bazarov was 
accepted as a model. 

The best known of the literary realists of Rus- 
sia is Count Leo Tolstoy — a man ripe in years, 
yet rich in literary achievement, who is still send- 
ing forth from his country seat at Yasnaya Pol- 
yana those productions which the civilized world 
awaits with an interest which has been accorded 
to no other writer of Slav nationality. The philo- 
sopher and mystic of Russian belles-lettres, by 
excellence, Tolstoy excels in the imaginative 
development of events from the operation of so- 
ciological laws. With an enormous grasp of types 
and situations, he tells not so much what did hap- 
pen as what might have happened. His smaller 
sketches resemble photographs retouched and 
colored ; his larger canvases, crowded with fig- 
ures, convey the impression of living panoramas. 
In his " Sebast6pol Sketches " (1854) Tolstoy has 
depicted war with a fullness and respect for actual- 
ity which have never been surpassed. His " War 
and Peace " (1865-68) gives a strikingly vivid 
picture of Russian life at the beginning of the 
century, wherein the fortunes of two aristocratic 
families — the Rost6vs and the Bolkonskys — 
form the focus of interest around which are 
grouped the chief events of the patriotic cam- 
paign against Napoleon. Among his best known 



252 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

stories is "Anna Karenina," in > which the conse- 
quences of a marriage without love — which is 
seen to lead, first to a love without marriage, and 
finally, under social stress, to a suicide — are set 
forth with admirable power of analysis. A few 
years ago, disavowing his literary work as worth- 
less, Tolst6y began the statement of his religious 
views, and has since given himself up wholly to 
the development of a theory of social reform in 
which many features of civilized life are condemned 
as evil. The latest production from his pen, en- 
titled " Resurrection," written in the pecuniary 
interest of the exiled and persecuted Dukhobortsy, 
deals with one of the author's favorite social 
problems. 

Realism, it may finally be said, is still the dis- 
tinguishing note of literary production in Russia ; 
and its representatives, who include women as well 
as men, are for the most part still striving in the 
interest, not of merely artistic ends, but of some 
transcendent purpose of social utility which they 
wish to see realized. This, indeed, has been to 
such an extent the dominating motive in the ex- 
pression of Russian thought for forty years past 
that if it were possible to characterize in a single 
sentence the whole period which has elapsed since 
the appearance of Gogol, it could be done best 
perhaps by the statement that among all the world 



LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 253 

literatures which make up the sum of our intellec- 
tual possessions as a race, the Eussian must ever 
be conspicuous for the intensity of its devotion to 
human welfare, as well as for the completeness 
with which it has combined artistic with humani- 
tarian ends. 



XIII 

THE RUSSIAN FUTURE 

Such has been the historical development of 
Russia ; such are the chief features of her civili- 
zation. Centuries of growth have given her a 
continuous territorial extent superior to that of 
any other nation on the planet. With enormous 
resources ; with immense populations from which 
to recruit her armies ; with her questions of for- 
eign aggrandizement turning not on the popular 
will, but on the simple decision of the ruler, 
Russia is enabled on land and sea to play the part, 
not only of a nation among nations, but of a first- 
class military power. Yet when we turn to her 
internal life, we find that in respect of both polit- 
ical and religious institutions she is not only not 
modern, but that she is living at least 400 years 
en retard as compared with western Europe. 
How largely her home problems have been ne- 
glected may be seen in the fact that, in portions of 
the empire, such as Great-Russia, the proportion 
of illiteracy rises as high as 94 per cent. Her 
land system, upon which depend the occupation 



THE RUSSIAN FUTURE 255 

and sustenance of the great bulk of her people, 
has now reached a condition of crisis, the feverish 
pulse beats of which are periodically announced 
to the world in rhythmically recurring famines. 
Kussia supports, in her mediaeval church, a super- 
stitious and unprogressive religion, repudiated in 
form by millions of her uneducated, rejected in 
substance and outright by most of her subjects 
who have any claim to culture. She is to-day, 
moreover, as devoid of free political institutions as 
she was in the times of Ivan the Terrible ; after 
ages of contact with Europe, her people accept the 
will of an autocrat, entrenched in the loyalty of 
the peasants, as the supreme law. Not one of 
the 150,000,000 of her population has the slightest 
voice in determining her home or foreign policies. 
Fearing free discussion far more than the plague, 
her absolutist regime punishes alike the political 
aspirations of her educated minority and that re- 
ligious dissent of her masses which dares to diverge 
from the prescribed faith of the Orthodox Church. 
Denying to the political and religious offender the 
right of trial by jury, elsewhere centuries old, 
Kussia refuses, to press and platform, privileges 
granted even to the Maoris of New Zealand, and 
maintains in the " administrative process " the 
same odious system of lettres de cachet as that 
which in the eighteenth century provoked against 
France the indignation of all Europe. 



256 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

How far, then, may such a power as Russia — 
a veritable fifteenth century state wearing the 
habiliments of the nineteenth, a power burdened 
with responsibilities abroad, harassed by disaffec- 
tion at home, expanded territorially beyond all 
manageable as well as reasonable limits — hope 
to perpetuate itself as an autocracy? For an- 
swer we must consider at greater length the in- 
ternal weakness that underlies much of the brave 
show which Eussia is still enabled to make to 
the world as a first-class military power. Her 
most vital interest to-day is agriculture. Forty 
years after emancipation, the industry and loyalty 
of the peasant continue to constitute the chief 
support of the Russian system. Not only do the 
peasantry maintain the autocratic form of govern- 
ment, they contribute the great bulk of the ex- 
penditures of the empire. It is, moreover, from 
the ranks of the agriculturists that the Russian 
armies are recruited; it is the brawn and sinew 
developed in the Russian villages which have en- 
abled the colonizer of the northeast to carry the 
Russian flag far towards the Pacific ; from the 
same source have issued the pluck and dash which 
have wrested the bulk of Central Asia from the 
nomad, and have made its desert blossom like a 
garden. Yet the peasants of Russia are poorer as 
a class than they were before 1861. Splendidly 



THE RUSSIAN FUTURE 257 

responsive to the plans of military generals, they 
seem to be growing less and less able to take care 
of themselves. Feeders of empire, they themselves 
are compelled to live from hand to mouth ; in years 
of want they die of hunger by thousands. Mean- 
while the conditions of agriculture in Russia are 
steadily going from bad to worse. Repeated fail- 
ures of the crops in certain districts, alternating 
with an occasional great famine — such as that of 
1891-92, as well as the later, only less severe, 
visitation of 1898 — sufficiently show the peril 
which menaces those economical conditions from 
which the masses of the Russian people draw 
their livelihood, and on which the autocratic 
regime depends so largely for its income. 

To this source of discontent, moreover 5 must be 
added the reactionary measures which have gone 
far towards nullifying, not only the benefits con- 
ferred by the Emancipation Act, but also the other 
reforms with which it was accompanied. It was 
the purpose of the legislation of 1861, not only to 
emancipate the peasant, but also to free him from 
the guardianship and autocratic authority — exer- 
cised now as police officer, now as judge, and now 
as general agent of the state — which the manorial 
lords had exerted since the beginning of the eigh- 
teenth centuryo The emancipation ukaz deprived 
this class of all further participation in the affairs 



258 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

of the peasant communes, yet by various acts of 
subsequent legislation the government re-admitted 
them to the functions from which they had been 
ousted. The first sign of this reaction manifested 
itself in the changed character of the " arbitrators 
of the peace " — officers whom the government 
intrusted (1862-63) with the duty of mediating 
between the peasants and the land-owning class in 
questions such as the allotment of land, arising 
out of emancipation. These functionaries, at first 
chosen from the best representatives of the nobility, 
gradually became venal and corrupt. In 1874 the 
functions of this class were transferred to police 
officials; while in 1889 the government returned 
to power over the peasantry certain members of 
the local nobility, as paid state officers, under the 
title of " chiefs of the rural cantons." These 
officers now wield unlimited judicial and execu- 
tive power in the villages under their care. The 
press is forbidden, under severe penalties, to 
publish complaints against them ; they have in 
their own hands all appeals which may be made 
against their decisions ; such responsibility as they 
acknowledge is a merely nominal and official one to 
the governor of the province. With the appoint- 
ment of the peasant judges under his control, with 
power to compel the peasant to work on his estate, 
as well as to flog the man at his will, the rural 



THE RUSSIAN FUTURE 259 

officer of to-day seems to play a part not greatly 
unlike that exercised by the manorial lord in the 
old days of serfdom. The legislation, moreover, 
which has thus, in twenty provinces of Central 
Kussia, replaced the justices of the peace appointed 
in connection with emancipation, by chiefs of rural 
cantons, has recently been applied to Siberia (June, 
1898), and is soon (1901) to be extended to the 
western governments of Kussia and to Poland. 
Meanwhile, by restrictions imposed (1890) upon 
the zemstva, the Russian government has consid- 
erably modified the former popular character of 
these provincial assemblies. 

Reaction is also manifest in the administration 
of the Russian cities, where municipal government, 
with its powers materially reduced by the ukaz of 
1894, has been placed almost entirely under chiefs 
nominated by the Emperor himself. Yet there 
are signs of a new life in the urban centres of pop- 
ulation, due partly to the movement of growth in 
which they are engaged, and partly to the appear- 
ance in them of the large industrial class which 
they are so powerfully aiding to develop. It used 
to be urged that Russia is too exclusively a coun- 
try of rural populations to produce or be fitted for 
political institutions similar to those which prevail 
in the West. But the conditions relied on in such 
an argument are beginning to pass away. The 



260 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

facts cited by Milyukov * show a considerable com- 
parative increase of the city populations. Thus in 
1724 the percentage of city people to the total in- 
habitants of Kussia was 3.00, or 328,000 people 
living in cities; in 1782 the city dwellers num- 
bered 800,000, or a percentage of 3.1. These 
figures increased in 1796 to 1,301,000 and 4.1 per 
cent ; in 1812 to 1,653,000, or 4.4 per cent ; in 
1835 to 3,025,000, or 5.8 per cent ; in 1851 to 
3,482,000, or 7.8 per cent ; in 1878 to 6,091,000, 
or 9.2 per cent; and in 1890 to 13,948,000, or 12.8 
per cent. In other words, the proportion of city to 
rural people has been multiplied four times since 
1724, three times since 1812, and twice since 1840 
or thereabouts. In the time of Peter the Great 
there were no more than 250 cities in the whole of 
Eussia. In the middle of the present century, out 
of 1000 Kussian cities, 878 had fewer than 10,000 
inhabitants, and only 32 more than 20,000. In 
1870, as described in 1873 by Schwanenbach, 27 
Russian towns had a population of 1000 ; 74 be- 
tween 1000 and 2000; 194 between 2000 and 
5000 ; 179 between 5000 and 10,000 ; 55 between 
10,000 and 15,000 ; 35 between 15,000 and 25,000 ; 
23 between 25,000 and 50,000 ; and 8 over 50,000. 
At the present time 40 cities have more than 

1 Glavniya Techeniya Russkoy Istoricheskoy Mysli ( The Chief 
Currents of Historical Ideas in Russia), vol. i., Moscow* 1898. 



THE RUSSIAN FUTURE 261 

20,000 ; 35 between 50,000 and 100,000 ; 19 more 
than 100,000; and 7 more than 150,000. The 
actual population of the Russian empire (census of 
1897) is 129,211,114, of which European Russia 
has 94,188,750. It should be added, as showing 
the modification which the former exclusive occu- 
pation of the peasant classes with agriculture is 
undergoing, that, in addition to the 1,500,000 men 
who constitute the factory workers of Russia, there 
are no fewer than 4,000,000 peasants who, besides 
tilling the soil, carry on various village industries. 
This development of the Russian cities, and of the 
industrial life within them, with its creation of a 
capital-and-labor problem not wanting in serious 
phases, such as occasional collisions between angry 
workmen and the authorities, points to a signifi- 
cant change in Russian conditions, and must con- 
tribute to the quickening of political ambition 
among the rural as well as the urban populations 
of Russia. 

What, then, with such cause for discontent 
among the peasants and artisans, may not be ex- 
pected from the educated classes, whose knowledge 
of countries constitutionally governed has made 
them eager for reform? It was in the heart of 
these classes that the revolutionary movement had 
its origin ; and though the acute phases of that 
movement are over, — let us hope forever, — the 



262 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

fact remains that the tradition of political conspi- 
racy in Russia is far from being dead. The chief 
cities are still centres of propaganda ; the reform 
agitation in the colleges and universities — long a 
chronic accompaniment of educational processes 
in Russia — has been much intensified in recent 
years by the arbitrary use of police and military 
power in the suppression of so-called " students' 
disturbances." The monthly lists of arrests for 
" political infidelity " which the Russian organs in 
Geneva and London 2 publish regularly would 
alone suffice to show that autocratic government 
in Russia is still grappling with the problem of 
political disaffection. It cannot now claim to be 
engaged in any struggle with assassins, for there 
is no assassination. Conspiracy in Russia to-day 
is mainly an effort to assert rights of criticism, 
free speech and public meeting granted in every 
other country in Europe ; the effort to suppress 
conspiracy is for the most part the effort to sus- 
pend the law of progress — to nullify that process 
of intellectual variation on which all national as 
well as all individual advance finally depends. 
Nor is Russia, which at the Hague Confer- 

1 See, in Russian, the Materials for the History of the Social- 
istic-Revolutionary Movement, periodically issued in Geneva ; 
also the ' ' Flying Sheets " (Letuchiyi Listki) published by the 
Russian Free Press Fund in London. 



THE RUSSIAN FUTURE 263 

ence sought to promote the world's peace, within 
measurable distance of the peace — the peace even 
of simple unity — which ought to prevail within 
her own borders. She boasts — or the boast is 
made for her — that " To every race she gives a 
home, And creeds and laws enjoy her shade." 
Such a claim may be valid for her attitude to- 
wards the peoples of Central Asia; it cannot 
pretend to any justification in the European di- 
vision of her empire. For here her recent history 
presents the spectacle of entire nationalities whose 
sympathy she has repelled, whose sentiment she 
has alienated, in the unwise effort to make them, 
in language, faith, and custom, an integral part 
of herself. In Asia, the semi-barbarian finds his 
race-life untouched ; in European Russia cultured 
peoples are despoiled of the things they hold 
almost as dear as existence itself — the Poles of 
their language, the Little-Russians of their litera- 
ture, the Baltic Germans of their religion, the 
^inlanders of their constitution. And if to these 
sources of division we add others — those antago- 
nisms of interest, for example, which disfranchise 
and degrade one section of the population with 
the whole force of another ; the conditions which 
exclude large classes of the population from the 
benefits of education; a political system which 
divides the people into Tsar worshipers and po- 



264 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

litical malcontents, and a religious system which 
opposes pronounced types of agnosticism to primitive 
forms of superstition — we shall be led to recognize 
that the metaphor of a " house divided against 
itself " is not without a certain application to this 
modern empire of two continents. 

How, then, has Russia thus far been able to 
maintain her system, her prestige as a military 
power? Much of her immunity in the past has 
been due to her isolation — to the fact that she 
has been able to accumulate her resources and 
consolidate her empire at a distance from the con- 
tending states of modern Europe. Her want of 
ocean frontier has for ages bulwarked her from 
foreign aggression. Yet this separateness from the 
first-class fighting nations cannot last forever. By 
coming rearrangements of border lines in the 
West, or by hostile contacts in the far East, Rus- 
sia must finally draw into that closeness of relation 
with the other great powers which is the destiny 
of all civilized races living a common life on the 
same round world. And in that time her re- 
sources will be, not the barriers which nature has 
reared, or which man artificially maintains, but 
the power of her people to compete with the other 
peoples in the things which make for national 
strength and greatness. Even in a competition 
of peace, it will be " the restless force of Europe's 



THE RUSSIAN FUTURE 265 

mind " rather than " the patient faith of Asia's 
heart " which will avail ; but should the compe- 
tition be one of arms, Eussia will hold her own 
only to the extent that the surpassing bravery of 
her individual soldier, the splendid inertia of her 
fighting squares, is supplemented by the intelli- 
gence, the mental alertness, the power of initi- 
ative, the scientific training and technical skill to 
which all modern success in war has been due. 
Did the peril which seems to menace her future 
come only from her religious conditions, Russia 
would still need the warning conveyed to her by 
the events of recent history. For a nation which 
cannot lift itself out of ecclesiasticism — which 
persists in living as if it were from the church 
and from church customs, and not from the spirit 
of free investigation, from the practice of free 
thought and free speech, that the social efficiency 
of peoples is to come — such a nation may pride 
itself on its enormous extent of territory, on its 
growing and already mighty population, most of 
all, perhaps, on its unity in the faith received 
from the fathers, yet it is destined to collapse, 
as Spain collapsed, at the first decisive touch of a 
virile modern race. 

Perhaps there is a likelihood of reform from 
within ? The chances of a " palace revolution " 
have passed away with the exclusively Oriental 



266 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

conditions in which such movements have their 
origin ; the chances of a military insurrection are 
every day growing more meagre ; the chances of 
a rising of the people may for the present be left 
entirely out of account. A military disaster, simi- 
lar to, yet on a larger scale than that of the 
Crimea, might very well revolutionize the political 
system of Russia, and would do this more effica- 
ciously than any other known agency. But should 
the country have to await the result of develop- 
mental conditions, it must look to education and 
industry for the changes desired, and to education 
especially, since in the last few years there has 
been an unwonted multiplication of schools for 
the people, due largely to the enterprise of the 
provincial assemblies. Thus far the prospect of 
reform as a result of imperial initiative is slender 
in the extreme. The Tsars still shelter themselves 
under the plea that there is something peculiar in 
Russian conditions and in the Russian people 
which makes autocracy indispensable, — though 
such a position is negatived by the scientific view 
of history, which, showing a process fundamentally 
alike for all races, teaches that they pass from a 
stage in which the power of a people is wielded 
for the people to a stage in which it is wielded by 
the people. The claim, again, that the Russian 
people are incapable of participation in the duties 



THE RUSSIAN FUTURE 267 

of the general government is sufficiently discounted 
by their long experience in the work of the mir 9 
and of other forms of local self-government. 

Much has been said regarding the inertia of the 
official class, as well as of the resistance to change 
sure to be offered to radical reforms by so con- 
servative a people as the peasants. Against this 
must be urged that the Eussians possess a degree 
of the power of self -adaptation to new conditions 
not met with in any other country in the world. 
They have been " changing all that " from the 
earliest periods of their history. It was a new 
beginning when the people threw off the pagan 
yoke and embraced Christianity; another when 
they broke with the traditions of Kiev and the 
udyelny system; still another when, under the 
influence of Peter, they gave up old Eussian cus- 
toms for the civilization of the West. On three 
or four occasions did the Eussians change their 
capital, to look around them each time with a new 
mind, as well as to have over them a different sky. 
In the seventeenth century thousands of Eussians 
separated themselves from the national church for 
a change of faith, with which they are still con- 
tent ; in the nineteenth, millions of them, after 
centuries of serfdom, re-adapted their lives to the 
comparatively strange conditions created by free- 
dom. Even now, at the heart of the revolutionary 



268 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

movement, there seems the foreboding of the still 
greater change which is to add these thousands 
and millions, as well as other thousands and mil- 
lions, to the list of peoples who, from a state of 
mere bodily freedom, have grown also into political 
liberty. It is, moreover, this same historic race 
trait — this power of self -adaptation to new condi- 
tions — which is meant in the phrase " the new 
generation " so constantly heard in modern Russia, 
it being there well understood that a single gen- 
eration frequently suffices to give some new and 
important direction to the intellectual or social 
tendencies of the people. Whence it may be 
urged without exaggeration that if constitutional 
reforms were granted in Russia, two generations 
would suffice to graft them upon the nation's life. 

Such a view acquires additional strength from 
the fact that the principle of popular representa- 
tion in the government of Russia is deeply im- 
pressed upon the national history, and that the 
Tsars have more than once admitted the principle, 
not only in the local, but also in the general affairs 
of the nation. The practice of calling sobory, or 
representative assemblies of the people, began 
immediately after the suppression of the folk- 
motes by the grand princes of Moscow. Between 
1550 and 1698 inclusive, no fewer than fifteen or 
sixteen of these assemblies were called. Their 



THE RUSSIAN FUTURE 269 

function was usually consultative — to decide 
whether war should be undertaken, certain taxes 
levied, internal disorder abolished, and so forth. 
The assemblies were differently constituted, ac- 
cording to the monarch and the occasion. In 
particular cases, the representation was of a single 
estate, such as the sobor of 1617, which was made 
up chiefly of Moscow merchants. Usually, though 
not exclusively, it was a representation of the no- 
bility, the bureaucracy, the clergy, the military, 
and the inhabitants of the cities and rural dis- 
tricts, together with (as in 1614 and 1682) the 
crown peasants and the merchants of Moscow. 
The assembly usually sat in the hall of Moscow, 
known as the Granovitaya Palata, or, by excep- 
tion, in the Palace of the Patriarch and the 
Uspensky Cathedral. The decisions reached were 
embodied in a document called " The General 
Verdict of the Land." These Eussian " states- 
general" were never abolished by law, and a 
careful student of them 1 declares that no legal 
act whatever lies in the way of a new convocation 
of the representatives of the empire. They are 
important as showing that the right of the people 
to be at least consulted on national affairs has 
always been recognized. Not only did Catherine 

1 Maxime Kovalevsky. See Modern Customs and Ancient 
Laws of Bussia. 



270 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

the Great coquet with the idea of popular insti- 
tutions in her " High Commission ; " the scheme 
of a constitution was prepared by one of the min- 
isters of Alexander I. ; even so recently as 1881 
Alexander II. could seriously " consider " the idea 
of a national assembly for Russia. 

We are thus entitled to regard the autocratic 
regime in Russia as maintained, not in the interest 
of the people, but in the interest of a ruling class, 
which is doubtless sincere enough to believe that 
the interest of the people coincides with its own. 
Hence we must interpret the courage with which 
the principle of autocracy is to be defended in 
Russia, as well as the " divine right " which finds 
expression in that courage, as signifying nothing 
more than the consciousness in the minds of the 
Tsar and his advisers that they have on their side 
the wills, and therefore the embodied power, of 
the great majority of the Russian people. Against 
the dismal but undoubted fact that their right to 
oppress the cultured and politically ambitious class 
is thus maintained by the ignorant and unpro- 
gressive class, may fairly be placed the far more 
encouraging fact that, however much the Tsars 
may refuse to shorten, they cannot help but con- 
tribute to, the process which is slowly but surely 
transforming Russia. Cling as they may to per- 
sonal power, they cannot choose but promote the 



THE RUSSIAN FUTURE 271 

very changes which are to make them and their 
function unnecessary. As the work done by the 
first rulers of Russia in furthering contact with 
the West brought on the religious protest ; as the 
Europeanization movement so powerfully led by 
Peter the Great forced the first clash of disaffec- 
tion under Nicholas I. ; and as the culture pro- 
cesses set up by Alexander I. and his successors 
supplied the motive of the revolutionary move- 
ment, so the measures taken under Nicholas II. 
in the present reign — measures for the encour- 
agement of industry and the spread of education 
among the people — are steadily making for the 
new conditions by which Russia is to be regener- 
ated. 

A word in conclusion. The people of Russia 
have shown that they possess qualities and apti- 
tudes which will ensure to them a future of po- 
tency, even of splendor, in the coming progress of 
the world. Submerged for 300 years in the night 
of the Tatar-Mongol domination; deprived of an 
advanced civilization for centuries after it had 
illumined the West ; too early plunged into the 
whirlpool of European politics; compelled to 
spend energies needed at home in wars of expan- 
sion or conquest; torn all the while by conflict 
between the conservatism of an inheritance from 
Asia and the progressive spirit which drew them 



272 RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS 

irresistibly to Europe — the Russians have already, 
if we consider merely the difficulties overcome, 
attained to a position of the first rank in national 
achievement. All the while, moreover, they have 
displayed a patience under humiliation, a resi- 
lience from disaster, and a power of self-sacrifice 
in the pursuit of ideal ends, which qualify them, if 
anything could, for national greatness. But they 
cannot reach their full stature as a people while a 
foreign caste — an autocracy which, as such, has 
already completed its historic part in their develop- 
ment — continues to hold them, largely in its 
own interest, to inadequate institutional forms 
elsewhere long outgrown, — forms which, degrad- 
ing their social efficiency to well-nigh mediaeval 
levels, not only disqualify them for tasks of world- 
unification, but also threaten the integrity of their 
national life. 

The Eussian government, by a policy of expan- 
sion and conquest, as well as by its maintenance 
of a large standing army, and its use of expensive 
modern armaments, may succeed for yet other 
decades in diverting attention fuorn internal ques- 
tions and in playing before Europe and the United 
States the part of a great world power. A com- 
bination of favorable circumstances might even 
enable it to delay for a considerable period that 
military collapse which sooner or later must over- 



THE RUSSIAN FUTURE 273 

take the nation driven into continually closer 
association and severer competition with powers 
higher and more efficient than itself in the order 
of sociological and political development. Yet the 
result cannot be permanently delayed. A people 
thus endowed and thus environed is fated not only 
to fully retrieve the isolations and deprivations 
of its past, but also to enter completely into the 
heritage which the future so manifestly has in store 
for it. Russian progress may be slow, if left 
altogether to educational and industrial processes. 
But it will be none the less inevitable. The great 
movements of sociological advance, retarded as 
they may be by individual interest, finally carry 
Tsars as well as nations along with them. It is the 
close connection existing between popular progress 
and political progress which makes the cause of 
industrial emancipation in Russia so full of pro- 
mise, and enables us to find the hope of a Russian 
" government for the people, of the people, and by 
the people," even in the dream and prophecy of 
an American protagonist of freedom : — 

" The peasant brain shall yet be wise, 

The untamed pulse grow calm and still ; 
The blind shall see, the lowly rise, 
And work in peace Time's wondrous will." 



INDEX 



Afanasdev, Ivan, 183. 

Agriculture, 13, 254, 255, 257. 

Aigun, Treaty of, 185. 

Aix-la-Chapelle, Treaty of, 92. 

Alexander First, ascends the throne, 
105 ; alliance with France, 105 : in- 
terview with Napoleon at Erfurt, 
105; calls Europe to arms against 
Buonaparte, 107 ; becomes King of 
Poland, 107 ; education, character, 
and reforms of, 108 ; introduces 
reactionary policies, 109 ; death of, 
109. 

Alexander Second, appearance, char- 
acter, and education, 123 ; end of 
Crimean War, 123 ; emancipates 
serfs, 132 ; other administrative re- 
forms, 136, 137. 

Alexander Third, redemption of land 
made compulsory, 133 ; succeeds to 
the throne, 154 ; shelves the Melikov 
reform scheme, 154 ; reactionary 
policies of, 155 ; decree giving free- 
dom of worship to Old Believers, 
172 ; persecution of the Dukho- 
bortsy, 172 ; death of, 156. 

Alexel Mikhailovich, accession to the 
throne, 65 ; social reforms of, 66 ; 
writings in the reign of, 237, 238. 

Alexel Petrovich, son of Peter the 
Great, plots against his father, 82 ; 
dies under punishment, 83. 

Amur, 184. 

Anna Ivanovna, 84-88; predilection for 
Germans, 85, 86 ; personal traits, 86, 
87 ; arranges an "ice wedding," 87; 
residence of, in Moscow, 88 ; re- 
ceives surrender of the Kirghiz 
Middle Horde, 188. 

Anna Leopoldovna, 88. 

Antakolsky, sculptor, 181. 



Apraxin, 72. 

Arctic Ocean, frontage to, 7. 

Asiatic possessions, 198. 

Atlasov, Vladimir, takes possession of 
Kamchatka, 184. 

Auguste Second, 84, 88. 

Autocracy, progress towards, 39-56 ; 
substitution of, for federated repub- 
lics, 56 ; changes resulting from set- 
ting up of, 57, 58 ; maintained in the 
interest of a ruling class, 270; threat- 
ened with military collapse, 272,273. 

Azov, campaign of Peter the Great 
against, 69. 

Baikal, Lake, 183. 

Baltic Germans, 263. 

Baltic secured for Russia by Peter the 
Great, 72 ; autonomous government 
of, disappears, 155. 

Baty, Tatar-Mongol leader, 52. 

Bazarov, revolutionary type, 250. 

Beard, prohibition of, 78, 163. 

Ber^zov, 183. 

Berlin, Treaty of, 124. 

Bessarabia, acquirement of, 180. 

Biron, favorite of Anna Ivanovna, 85, 
86, 93. 

Black Sea, 7, 8. 

Blagoveshchensk, 185. 

Bogdanovich, Little-Russian drama- 
tist, 244. 

Bogolyubov, 150. 

Bogolyubsky, 46, 53, 54. 

Boyary, military class, 44. 

Bukhara, 188, 190 ; defeat of its army 
by Romanovsky, 190. 

Bukharest, Treaty of, 180. 

Byzantinism, influence of, upon Rus- 
sia, 16, 27, 38 ; a lost cause, 66 ; po- 
sition of women under, 142, 143. 



276 



INDEX 



Caspian Sea, 7, 8. 

Catherine First, 76, 77, 82, 83. 

Catherine Second (the Great), German 
origin of, 94 ; her husband becomes 
Peter Third, 92 ; conspires to obtain 
the throne, 95 ; abdication and mur- 
der of Peter Third, 95 ; the "High 
Commission " of, 97; reforms of, 95- 
97 ; personal appearance, character, 
and ambitions of, 97-99 ; literary 
activity, 98-100, 243, 244 ; punishes 
Radishchev, the reformer, 100 ; 
death of, 101. 

Caucasus, territory of, passes to Rus- 
sia, 180, 181 ; influence of, upon 
Russian literature, 247. 

Central Asia, source of invasion, 187; 
earliest official relations with, 188, 
189 ; Kirghiz become subject to Rus- 
sia, 188, 189 ; Chernayev takes 
Chemkent and receives submission 
of Tashkent, 189 ; Gortchakoff ex- 
plains Russian policy in, to the 
Powers, 190 ; Bukharan force de- 
feated by Gen. Romanovsky, 190; 
defeat of conjoined troops of Khiva 
and Bukhara by Kaufmann, 191 ; 
fall of Samarkand, 191 ; massacre of 
the Turkoman Yomuds, 192 ; Khivan 
territory annexed, 192 ; Schouva- 
loff' s disclaimer to the Powers, 192 ; 
Khokandian army defeated, 192, 
193 ; annexation of Khokand, 193 ; 
TekkeVTurkomans, 193; defeat of 
Gen. Lomakin, 194; Tekke" fortifi- 
cation stormed by Skobelev, 195 ; 
massacre of Tekk^s, 195 ; recall of 
Skobelev, 196 ; acquisition of Merv 
and the Merv oasis, 196; expansion 
in a state policy, 199; relation of 
government policy in, to actions of 
military leaders, 199. 

Charles Thirteenth cedes Finland and 
Bothnia, 106, 107. 

Charles Twelfth defeated by Peter the 
Great, 72. 

Chelyadin stabbed by Ivan the Terri- 
ble, 56. 

Chemkent, 189. 

Chernayev, Gen., 189. 

Chinese, attitude of, towards Russian 
advance, 198. 



Christ personified in sects, 171. 

Christianity, influence of, upon early 
Russian life, 28-30, 38, 39 ; connec- 
tion of, with principle of autocratic 
rule, 39. 

"Christians," name given to the 
peasants by the Tatar-Mongols, 113. 

Church, property of, secularized, 27 ; 
solidarity of revolutionists with 
movement against, 159, 160 ; Russian 
liberals and, 159 ; resemblances of 
Russian, to Greek, 162 ; schism in, 
159-165 ; general movement of dis- 
sent from teachings of, 165-171 ; 
proselytism in, 175. 

Church Code, 236. 

Cities, poorly developed, 13, 14 ; 
growth of, 259-261. 

Civil wars, 40, 41. 

Commerce, early, of Russia, 36. 

Communists, religious sect, 170. 

Constantinople, 16. 

Constitution, scheme of, for Russia, by 
Speransky, 108 ; by Loris Me"likov, 
153, 154. 

Corneille, imitation of, 243. 

Cossacks in Siberia, 183 ; in Central 
Asia, 188. 

Crimean War, 122, 125. 

Culture, retardation of, by geographi- 
cal position and religious faith, 17, 
19, 20, 21 ; retardation of, by lan- 
guage, 18 ; contrast of Russian, with 
west European, 19, 22. 

Culture movement, its protest against 
autocracy, 115. 

Cyrillus, missionary, 228; script in- 
vented by, 228, 229. 

"Dancers," sect, 170. 

Danghil-Tepe, 194. 

Daniel Alexandrovich, 53. 

" Dead Souls," novel by Gogol, 248. 

" Decembrists," conspiracy and insur- 
rection of, 118, 119; in exile, 219, 
220 ; movement of, revived, 145. 

Derzhavin, poet, 243. 

Dissent, general movement of, 165- 
171. 

Dniepr, 10. 

Dolgoriiky, Prince, founder of Mos- 
cow, 51, 52. 



INDEX 



277 



Drmostroy, 142, 143, 144, 236 ; come- 
dies illustrating period of, 249. 

Dostoyevsky, novelist, treatment of, 
as an exile, 220-223; life in Siberia 
of, 222 ; writings of, 249. 

Dress reform, 77, 78. 

Druzhina, prince's armed band, 35. 

Dukhobortsy (" Spirit Wrestlers "), 
167, 172, 173 ; novel written in their 
interest, 252. 

Ecclesiasticism, 265. 

Education, reform of, 136, 137 ; in the 
sixties, 144 ; obstacles placed in the 
way of, 145, 146 ; Tolstoy's plan of, 
to counteract "Nihilism," 147 ; dis- 
abilities imposed upon the Jews in, 
174. 

Elizabeth Petrovna, accession of, 89; 
personality, character, and educa- 
tion, 90 ; a zealous persecutor, 91 ; 
wages war against the Swedes, 92. 

Emancipation Act, 132-138 ; stimu- 
lates the demand for political rights, 
146. 

Encyclopedists, 127. 

Etape houses in Siberia, 213, 214. 

Europeanization, in time of Peter the 
Great, 59-84 ; as wrought by com- 
merce, 62, 63. 

Expansion, territorial, rate and ex- 
tent of, 198 ; energies employed in, 
operate against political progress, 



Factory workers, number of, 261. 

" Fathers and Children," Nihilist 
novel by Tourgu^neff, 250, 251. 

Feodor Alex^yevich, 66. 

Feodor Ivanovich, 63, 64. 

Fergana, Central Asian province, 193. 

Festival of Bacchus, instituted by 
Anna Ivanovna, 87. 

Finland, ceded to Russia, 106 ; guar- 
anteed constitutional privileges, 
107 ; constitution of, abrogated, 157. 

Finns, 14, 15, 44. 

Fioraventi, Italian architect, 61. 

"Flagellants," sect, 169, 170. 

Fon Vizin, writer of comedies, 243. 

Foreigners, attitude of, towards Rus- 



Fourteenth century, 50. 
Frederikshamn, Treaty of, 106, 180. 
"Free Russia," organ of political re- 
form, 225. 

Galicia, absorbed by western Europe, 
52. 

Gellert, imitated, 244. 

Geographical features, 7-9; climate, 
9, 10 ; rivers, 10 ; zones, 10, 11 ; posi- 
tion in Europe, 59. 

Geok-Tepe, Tekk^-Turkoman strong- 
hold stormed by Gen. Skobelev, 194. 

Godunov, Boris, 64. 

Gogol, writes against serfdom, 130 ; 
novels, 248. 

Goldenberg, 151. 

Golden Horde, Tatar-Mongol empire, 
48. 

Golovachev, Gen., 192. 

Goncharov, novelist, 249. 

Gordon, Patrick, chief counselor of 
Peter the Great, 74. 

Gortchakoff, Prince, 124 ; circular to 
the Powers, 190. 

Gourko, Gen., 151, 156. 

Government, the udyelny system, 
30-35, 39 ; a source of disorder, 40 ; 
nature of, 41; princes and grand- 
princes, 34, 35 ; gradual change to 
autocratic system, 45, 46, 50, 51, 
53-56 ; results of change, 57, 58 ; 
conditions of, 113, 114. 

Grand-prince, duties of, 35. 

Great-Russian language, 18, 19, 227- 
232, 240-242 ; printed type, 18, 228, 
229. 

Great-Russians, origin of, 44, 45 ; fu- 
ture of, 271, 272. 

GriboyMov, writer of comedies, 245. 

Grmeve"tsky, kills Alexander Second, 
154. 

Gunzburg, Sophia, commits suicide, 
156. 

Hague, Peace Congress at, 158. 
Hartmann, 152. 
Herat, 197. 

Herzen, publicist and litterateur, 131. 
Hierarchists, 164. 

" High Commission " of Catherine 
the Great, 97. 



278 



INDEX 



" Holy Alliance," 107, 109. 

"Holy League," society to combat 

"Nihilism," 155. 
Holy Synod, founded by Peter the 

Great, 81. 
Hunger strikes, 150. 

Igor, succeeds Olga, 27 ; exploits of, 
celebrated, 234. 

Hliteracy, 254. 

Individualism of Russian Slavs, 7, 114, 
115. 

Inertia of official class and peasants, 
267. 

Irkutsk, 183. 

Ivan Fifth, 85. 

Ivan Fourth (the Terrible), a madman 
on the throne, 55 ; reign of terror 
inaugurated by, 55, 56 ; letters and 
Kurbsky's history of, 236. 

Ivan Sixth, 88. 

Ivan Third (Vassilyevich), 54; de- 
stroys independence of the repub- 
lics, 56. 

Jews, persecution of, 173, 174 ; under 

educational disabilities, 174. 
Jomini, Baron, 197. 
"Jumpers," religious sect, 170. 

Kamchatka, 184 ; exile to, 202. 

Kantemir, poet, 243. 

Kara, flogging of political prisoners 
at, 156 ; settlements of, 215 ; mines 
and prisons of, 216 ; evils of con- 
vict life at, 217 ; modern interest 
in, 217 ; treatment of exiles at, 
217. 

Karakazov, 146, 147. 

Karamzin, 7, 244 ; history of Russian 
empire, 245. 

Kaufmann, Gen., 191. 

Kavalsky, 150. 

Kazan, 108, 146, 286. 

Kennan, George, exile system criti- 
cised by, 206, 211, 212, 216. 

Khabarovsk, 185. 

Khaltiirin, 152. 

Kharkov, 108. 

Khazars, 14, 15, 23, 24, 26. 

Kh^mnitser, fabulist, 244. 

Khiva, 188, 189; campaign against, 



191 ; massacre in the oasis of, by 
Gen. Kaufmann, 192; annexation 
of, 192. 

Khokand, 189, 190 ; army of, defeated 
at Makhram, 193 ; annexed to Rus- 
sia, 193. 

Kiev, 10, 33, 34 ; chosen as capital of 
Russia by Oleg, 26 ; centre of the 
old traditions, 42 ; embellishment 
of, 42, 43 ; rivalry of, with Suzdal, 
44 ; fall of, 46. 

King of Bells, 61. 

Kireyevsky, 234. 

Kirghiz, 188, 189. 

Knights, round table of, 234. 

Knyaz or prince, functions and au- 
thority of, 35, 36. 

Kossuth, 121. 

Kotoshikhin, 143 ; writings of, 238. 

Kovalevsky, Maxime, 269. 

Kreml, of Moscow, 60. 

KropotMn, 151. 

Krylov, fabulist, 245. 

Kryzhanich, as exile, 219; writings 
of, 237, 238. 

Kurland, annexation of, 101. 

Kuropatkin, Gen., 195. 

Kushk, 197. 

La Fontaine, imitated, 244. 

Language, Russian, origin and affilia- 
tions of, as a spoken tongue, 227 ; 
alphabet for, invented by Cyrillus, 
227, 228 ; Ecclesiastical Slavonic, 
227-229, 240, 241 ; improvement of 
Cyrillic characters by Peter the 
Great, 228, 229 ; grammatical struc- 
ture of, and difficulty of acquiring, 
230, 231. 

Lapukhina, Evdokia, first wife of 
Peter the Great, 69 ; her plot 
against Peter and punishment, 83. 

Law Messenger, 224. 

Lefort, Francis, confidential helper of 
Peter the Great, 74. 

Leibnitz, "state councilor" of Rus- 
sia, 81. 

L^rmontov, poetical writings of, 247. 

Literature, beginning of, in chroni- 
cles and popular writings, 232; 
popular songs, 232, 233 ; byliny or 
epic songs, 233 ; cycles of Kiev, 



INDEX 



279 



Novgorod, and Moscow, 234 ; heroes 
of the byliny 234 ; the Igor epic, 
234, 235; professional singers of, 
235 ; Moscow period of, 236 ; first 
printing office in Russia burnt by a 
mob, 236; influence of the schism 
on, 237 ; writings of Kryzhanich, 
237 ; dramatic compositions, 238 ; 
works of, in reign of Peter the 
Great, 238, 239 ; list of translations 
into Russian, 239 ; struggle between 
Ecclesiastical Slavonic and the lan- 
guage of the people, 240, 241 ; 
Lomonosov provides Russia with a 
literary dialect, 241 ; life and work 
of Lomonosov, 242, 243 ; transla- 
tions and imitations from the 
French, 242-244 ; in the age of 
Catherine the Great, 243, 244 ; be- 
ginning of, in nineteenth century 
with Karamzin, 244 ; advent of 
Pushkin, 245 ; poems of Pushkin, 
247 ; writings of L^rmontov, 247 ; 
transition from romantic period to 
realism, 248 ; busies itself with so- 
cial problems, 248 ; Saltykov, Ne- 
krasov, Dostoye>sky, Goncharov, 
Chernishe>sky, Ostrovsky, 249 ; 
Tourgueneff, 250; Count Leo Tol- 
stoy, 251, 252 ; dominating motive 
of realism in, 252, 253. 

Lithuania, absorbed by Poland, 52; 
frees itself from Tatar-Mongol yoke, 
48 ; relations of, with Russia, 62. 

Little-Russia, relations of, with Rus- 
sia, 62; Cossack power abolished in, 
by Catherine the Great, 101 ; serf- 
dom introduced into, 126. 

Little-Russians, 16. 

Lomakin, Gen., defeated by Tekke"- 
Turkomans, 194. 

Lomonosov, life and writings of, 242. 

London, Treaty of, 124. 

Lopukhina, Princess, punished by 
Elizabeth Petrovna, 91. 

Lord Novgorod the Great, 37. 

Lutherans, 173. 

Madonna, personified by sects, 171. 
Manchuria, 186. 

Masampho, acquired by Russia, 187. 
Maxim the Greek, 161. 



" May Laws," operation of, 173, 174. 

M(51ikov, Loris, 151-153. 

Mennonites, religious sect, 173. 

M^nshikov, collaborator of Peter the 
Great, 76. 

Merv, acquisition of, 196 ; railroad 
through, 197. 

M^sentsev, Gen., assassinated, 150. 

Mikhail Feodorovich, first of the 
Romanovs, 65. 

"Milk Drinkers," religious sect, 167, 
168, 172. 

Miloslavskys, the, 66, 67. 

Milyukov, on city populations, 260. 

Mir, or village commune, early govern- 
ment in, 24, 26 ; description of, 
134. 

Mitau, 85. 

Modern Russia, conditions of, 254- 
262 ; illiteracy in, 254 ; agriculture 
of, 254, 255, 256, 257 ; peasant and 
landlord class, 257-259 ; political 
conditions of, 255 ; reaction in the 
cities of, 259-261 ; conspiracy among 
educated classes in, 261, 262 ; intol- 
erance of race independence by 
263; antagonism between different 
sections of, 263, 264 ; chances of re- 
form in, 265, 266 ; alleged inertia of 
official class and peasants in, 267; 
coming changes in, 268, 271-273; 
meaning and prospects of autocracy 
in, 256, 272, 273. 

Moliere, translated into Russian, 238. 

Moscow (city), settlement of, 51, 52 ; 
first prince of, 52 ; in the 16th cen- 
tury, 60; structural features of, 60, 
61 ; cathedrals of, 61 ; consolidates 
autocratic system, 63 ; Vladislas, the 
Pole, enthroned in, 64 ; first Rus- 
sian printing office in, destroyed by 
mob, 236. 

Moscow (principality), founded by 
Daniel Alexandrovich, 53 ; grand- 
princes of, 53, 54. 

Mountains, 9. 

Muravi6v, " Amursky," governor-gen- 
eral of eastern Siberia, 184 ; acquires 
territory in northern Asia, 184, 185 ; 
obtains the Treaty of Aigun and the 
surrender of regions on the Amur, 
185. 



W 



280 



INDEX 



Muraviev, Gen., suppresses the Polish 

insurrection (1863), 139. 
Muravie>, one of the " Decembrists," 

220. 
"Mutes," religious sect, 165. 
"Mystics," religious sect, 169. 

Napoleon Buonaparte, 105-107. 

Napoleonic wars, 109, 112, 117. 

Narva, battle of, 72. 

Nechayev, conspiracy of, 147. 

Nekrasov, poet, 249. 

Nerchinsk, silver mines of, 215. 

Nestor, chronicler, 28. 

Neva, 10, 110. 

Nevelsky, Capt., 185. 

Nevsky, Alexander, 52. 

Nevsky Prospect, 81, 110. 

Nicholas First, collision of, with the 
party of reform, 114, 117, 118 ; con- 
spiracy against, by secret societies, 
118; the "Decembrists" and, 118, 
119; insurrection in the Square of 
the Senate quelled by, 119 ; personal 
traits of, 119 ; achievements of, 120 ; 
wars of, with Persia and Turkey, 
120 ; Polish insurrection in reign of 
(1830-31), 120 ; suppresses the insur- 
rection, 121 ; intervenes on behalf 
of Austrian despotism, 121 ; disaster 
in the Crimea, 122 ; death of, 122 ; 
instruction concerning Russian flag, 
185. 

Nicholas Second, accession, 156 ; dis- 
misses Gen. Gourko, 156; announces 
that he will protect the principle of 
autocracy, 157 ; abrogates the con- 
stitution of Finland, 157 ; proposes 
to the powers a reduction of arma- 
ments, 157, 158 ; religious prohibi- 
tions under, 172, 174. 

" Nihilism," origin of term, 140 ; 
causes of, 142, 143 ; as a movement 
against the ideas of the church and 
paternal authority, 144 ; intensified 
by grievances of professors and stu- 
dents, 145 ; leads to revolutionary 
movement, 146 ; machinations of, 
combated, 155. 

Nikolayevsk, 185. 

Nikon, 161, 162. 

Ninth Century, 23, 24, 25. 



Nizhny-Novgorod, 53. 

Novgorod (city), 34. 

Novgorod (republic), 37, 38, 53 ; resist- 
ance of, broken, 55 ; independence 
of, destroyed, 56. 

Nystadt, Peace of, 180. 

Ob, River, 181. 

Okhotsk, Sea of, 183, 184. 

Old Believers, 161, 162, 164, 172. 

Old Bulgarian language, 227, 228. 

Oleg, accession, 25 ; chooses Kiev as 
his capital, 26, 42. 

Olga, first Christian ruler, 27. 

Omsk, 188. 

Orenburg, settlement of, 188 ; govern- 
ment of, 189. 

Orlov, Alexel, favorite of Catherine 
the Great, 95. 

Ostrovsky, writer of comedies, 249. 

Pacific, 9. 

Palace revolutions, chances of, 265. 

Palaeologus, Sophia, wife of Ivan the 
Great, 63. 

Pale, Jewish, 174. 

Pamirs, the, 197. 

Panjdih, 197. 

" Paradise Lost " translated, 244. 

Paris, Treaty of, 123. 

Paskie>ich, Gen., crushes the Poliih 
patriots (1831), 121. 

Paul First, accession, 102; personal 
traits, 103, 104 ; murdered, 105. 

Peasants and landlord, 257-259. 

Peasants, condition of, 112, 113 ; effect 
of reforms of Peter the Great on, 
116; history of their enslavement, 
125-132 ; extension of serfdom in 
18th century, 126 ; account of serf- 
dom and emancipation, 123-139 ; 
delivered from subservience to land- 
owning class, 134 ; effort to develop 
disaffection amongst, 147-149. 

Pechenegs, 14, 15, 23. 

Pechorin, hero of story by L6rmontov, 
247. 

Pekin, Treaty of, 186. 

People, early freedom of, 114 ; their 
excessive individualism and inability 
to cooperate, 114, 115 ; division of, 
into educated and politically imam- 



INDEX 



281 



bitious, 116, 117 ; qualities and en- 
dowments of, 272. 

Perm, republic of, loses its indepen- 
dence, 56. 

Perovskaya, Sophia, connection of, 
with Moscow train explosion, 152 ; 
executed for assassination of Alex- 
ander Second, 154. 

Peter First (the Great), boyish ex- 
periences of, 67, 68 ; frequents the 
German suburb, 68 ; passion of, for 
boating, 69 ; takes part in sham 
fights, 69 ; campaign against the 
Turks, 69 ; journey to western Eu- 
rope, 70 ; studies of, abroad, 71 ; re- 
called to Russia by the insurrection 
of the Streltsy, 71 ; war with Sweden 
and defeat of Charles Twelfth at 
Poltava, 72 ; foundation of St. Peters- 
burg, 73 ; friends and assistants of, 
74 ; relations with Catherine, 76, 77; 
social reforms of, 77 ; his intemper- 
ate habits, 79 ; substitutes titles 
gained by service for former classi- 
fications of rank, 79 ; a<lministrative 
reforms of, 80 ; reforms army, 80 ; 
religious tolerance of, 81 ; encourages 
education, 81 ; end of war with Swe- 
den, 82 ; second voyage to Europe, 

82 ; treason of Alexei Petrovich, 82, 

83 ; opposition given to reforms of, 
by schismatics, 162, 163 ; history of, 
by Krekshin, 238. 

Petersburg, St., climate of, 10; foun- 
dation of, by Peter the Great, 72, 
73, 75, 76 ; chief thoroughfare in, 81 ; 
the Gazette de, 81 ; canal from La- 
doga to, 88 ; pomp and structural 
features of, 110 ; brilliance of court 
in, 111. 

Peter Second, 84. 

Peter Third, accession, 92 ; marriage 
of, to Sophia Augusta Frederica 
(Catherine the Great), 94; unpopu- 
larity of, 93 ; abdicates in favor of 
his wife and is murdered, 95. 

Petrovsk, 185. 

Philippians, religious sect, 165. 

"Pilgrims," religious sect, 165. 

Pisemsky, novelist, 250. 

Pobyedonostsev, 173. 

Pogodin, 40. 



Poland, absorbs Lithuania, 53 ; al- 
leged conspiracy in favor of, under 
Ivan the Terrible, 55 ; succession 
of Auguste Second to throne of, 84, 
88 ; relations of, with Russia, 62 ; 
partitions of, 101, 107, 180; king- 
dom of, revived by Buonaparte, 106; 
Alexander First becomes king of, 
107 ; granted a constitution, 107; 
insurrection in (1830-31), 120, 121 ; 
Russian reprisals and end of Po- 
land, 121; insurrection in (1863), 
139 ; complete destruction of politi- 
cal autonomy of, 139 ; Gen. Gourko 
dismissed from government of, 156. 

Poles, 16, 17; seat Vladislas on the 
throne of Moscow, 64. 

Polish conspirators in Siberia, 216. 

Polotsky, dramatic writer, 238. 

Polovtsy, 14, 15 ; campaign against 
described, 234. 

Poltava, victory of, 72. 

Popular Institutions, the vecM, or 
folk-mote, 35-38 ; political power of 
vedie, 36; the republic, 35-38 ; 
popular assemblies destroyed, 56. 

Popular risings, insurrection of 
Stenko Razyn, 63 ; movement 
against the Poles, 64, 65 ; Pugache"v 
insurrection, 101. 

Population of empire, total, 261 ; in 
European Russia, 261 ; in Asia, 198. 

Port Arthur, 186. 

Pososhkov, writings of, 239. 

Possessions of Russia, in Asia, 198; 
difficulties of administering, 199. 

Preobrazhensky, country residence of 
the Tsars, 66, 69. 

Priestless Sects, 163-165. 

Principalities of Russia, 53. 

Propaganda, movement of, 147, 148. 

Proselytism, punishment of, 173. 

Pskov, chronicles of, 232. 

Pugachev, insurrection led by, 101. 

Pushkin, characterization of St. Pe- 
tersburg by, 73 ; poems of, 245- 
247. 

Race life in Russia, 263. 
Racine, imitation of, 243. 
Radishchev, as exile, 219 ; writings of, 
100, 128, 243, 244. 



282 



INDEX 



Railroads, St. Petersburg to Moscow, 
120 ; in Central Asia, 197 ; through 
Siberia, 186. 

Rank, degrees of, 79. 

Raskol. See Religion, Church, Dis- 
sent, etc. 

Reform, chances of, 265, 266. 

Religion, rationalism in, 161 ; Rus- 
sia, a country of primitive, 174-176; 
denial of, to culture, 177, 178. 

Republics, 35, 38 ; destruction of, 54, 
56. 

" Re visor," novel by Gogol, 248. 

Revolutionary movement, outbreak 
of "Decembrists," 118, 119; first 
martyrs of, 119; begins in "Nihil- 
ism " and in imperfect social and 
political conditions, 140-143 ; rejec- 
tion of church dogmas and patri- 
archal system, 144 ; proclamation 
of " central revolutionary commit- 
tee," 146 ; Karakasov shoots at the 
Emperor, 146, 147 ; Count Tolstoy's 
scheme for removing discontent, 
147 ; the " going-to-the-people " 
movement, 148 ; the administrative 
system, 149 ; Viera Sasiilicb wounds 
Trepov and is acquitted, 150 ; " hun- 
ger strikes " in Russian prisons, 150; 
Gen. M^sentsev assassinated, 150; 
Alexander Second fired at by Solo- 
viev, 151; plot to kill the Tsar 
while traveling, 151, 152 ; explosion 
at the Winter Palace, 152 ; Loris 
Me"likov made dictator, 153 ; assas- 
sination of Alexander Second, 153, 
154 ; the assassins executed, 154 ; 
Melikov reform proposals shelved 
by Alexander Third, 154 ; reaction- 
ary policies to combat the revolu- 
tionists, 155 ; the Yakutsk tragedy, 
155; flogging to death of Hope Si- 
gida, 156. 

Roman Catholics, 173. 

Romanov, Mikhail Feodorovich, 65. 

Romanovs, origin of, 64 ; first of, on 
the throne, 65 ; court life of, 111. 

Romanovsky, Gen., 190. 

Romodanovsky, confidential helper of 
Peter the Great, 74. 

Rosen, Baron, "Russian conspirators 
in Siberia," 220. 



Rostov, 44. 

Rostovsky, dramatic writer, 238. 

Rurik dynasty, begins, 25 ; end of, 
63, 64. 

" Russian Women," poem by Nekra- 
sov, 220. 

Russian rulers, Rurik, Oleg, 25, 26 ; 
Igor, Olga, Svyatoslav, 27 ; Vladi- 
mir, 28; Yaroslav, 33, 43; Yury 
Dolgoruky, 51 ; Alexander Nevsky, 
52 ; Daniel Alexandrovich, 52 ; 
Ivan Third (Vassilyevich), 36, 55, 
56; Ivan Fourth (the Terrible), 
55, 56 ; Feodor Ivanovich, 63, 
64 ; Boris Godunov, 64 ; Mikhail 
Feodorovich Romanov, 65 ; Alexel 
Mikhailovich, 65, 66 ; Feodor Alex- 
eyevich, 66 ; Sophia Alex^yevna, 
67; Peter First (the Great), 67- 
83; Catherine First, 76-83; Anna 
Ivanovna, 84-88 ; Anna Leopold- 
ovna, 88 ; Elizabeth Petr6vna, 89- 
92 ; Peter Third, 92-95 ; Catherine 
Second (the Great), 94-100, 243, 
244 ; Paul First, 102-105 ; Alexan- 
der First, 105-109 ; Nicholas First, 
114-122; Alexander Second, 123- 
137 ; Alexander Third, 154-156 ; 
Nicholas Second, 156-158. 

" Russians," origin of name, 25. 

Russian Slavs, origin of, 2, 3 ; nature 
worship, 3, 5; social organization, 
5, 6 ; military characters, 6, 7 ; 
excessive individualism, 7, 114; 
migratory habits, 12, 13 ; agricul- 
tural occupations, 13, 14 ; human 
environment, 14, 15 ; intermingling 
with Finnish, Tatar, and Turkic ele- 
ments, 15, 16 ; early history, 23, 24 ; 
called " Russi," 25. 

Russkaya Pravda (" Russian Right ") 
code of laws, 43. 

Riisskoe Bogatstvo, cited from, 209. 

Rybnikov, 234. 

Saints, 29. 

Sakhalin, island of, 185. 
Saltykov, satirist, 249. 
Samarkand, 191, 197. 
San Stefano, Treaty of, 124. 
Sarai, seat of Tatar-Mongol Khans, 
48-50. 



INDEX 



283 



Sasulich, Viera, 150. 

Scandinavians in Russia, 24-27. 

Schism, 159-165. 

Schouvaloff , 192. 

Sebastopol, fall of, 123. 

Sects, their solidarity with the revolu- 
tionary party, 159, 160 ; beginning 
of, in religious schism of 16th cen- 
tury, 160 ; revision of church books 
by Nikon, 161 ; schismatics repudi- 
ate the revision, 161 ; worship of 
the raskolniki, 162 ; the schism as 
opposition to the state, 162, 163; 
severity and tolerance of, by gov- 
ernment, 163, 164 ; divisions of the 
schism dating from Nikon, 165 ; 
general movement of dissent, 166, 
167 ; account of dissenting sects, 
167, 171 ; punishment of dissent, 
173. 

Selyaninovich, personification of agri- 
culture, 233. 

Serfdom, story of, 125-132 ; extension 
of in 17th and 18th century, 126 ; 
deporting of slaves to the mines, 
127 ; forced labor in, 127 ; protest 
against, by Radishchev, 100, 128, 
243, 244 ; decrees of Paul and Alex- 
ander First, 28 ; first experiment 
in emancipation, 129 ; reform of, 
on the banner of the Decembrists, 
129, 130 ; views of Nicholas First 
concerning, 130 ; criticisms of, by 
Shchedrin, Gogol, and Tourgu£- 
neff, 130, 131 ; Herzen's polemic 
against, 131, 132 ; causes favoring 
abolition of, 132 ; final legislative 
action against and decree of eman- 
cipation, 132-134 ; institution of the 
mir reemphasized, 134 ; news of 
emancipation, how received, 135, 
136 ; redemption of land made com- 
pulsory, 133 ; total number of slaves 
released from, 133, 134. 

Seventeenth century, 66 ; religious 
revolt in, 159-166. 

Shchedrin, satirist, writes against 
serfdom, 130. 

Siberia, discovery of, by Yermak, 181, 

182 ; Cossacks reach the Pacific, 

183 ; Muraviev made governor-gen- 
eral of eastern Siberia, 184 ; Mura- 



viev's schemes for the acquirement 
of northern Asia, 184 ; founds 
Petrovsk, Nikolayevsk, Blagovesh- 
chensk, and Khabarovsk, 185 ; ob- 
tains the treaty of Aigun and the 
cession of territory in the Amur, 
185 ; Gen. Ignatiev, by Treaty of 
Pekin, obtains Manchuria, 186 ; 
adequate railway system authorized 
for, 186 ; description of the system, 
186 ; cession of Port Arthur, Ta- 
lien-Wan, and Masampho to Russia, 
186, 187 ; description of, 201, 202. 
Siberian exile, deportations of "po- 
liticals " during the revolutionary 
movement, 149 ; system of, begins, 
203; first batch of exiles, 203; in- 
adequacy of exile system, 204 ; route 
taken by exile marching parties, 
204; exiles' begging song, 205; 
systematization and improvement 
of, 205 ; etape houses erected, 206 ; 
classes of exiles, 206 ; number of 
exiles deported, 207-209 ; convicts 
on Island of Sakhalin, 207 ; volun- 
tary exiles (women and children), 
207, 208; percentage of political 
offenders, 208 ; numbers exiled by 
" administrative process," 208, 209 ; 
reports of prison commissions on 
exile system, 208 ; evils of, 209-219 ; 
prisons of European Russia, 209 ; 
Tium^n forwarding prison, 209- 
212 ; transference to Tomsk by con- 
vict barges, 209, 211, 212 ; convey- 
ance from Tomsk to Irkutsk, 212, 
213 ; order of the march, 213 ; de- 
scription of the etape and polu-etape 
houses, 214; demoralization pro- 
duced by system of, 214 ; banish- 
ment for loss of passport, 214; 
hardships of the road, 215 ; charac- 
ter of hospital accommodations, 215 ; 
silver mines of Nerchinsk, 215, 216 ; 
life of convicts at Kara, 216 ; Kara 
death rate, 217 ; punishments at 
Kara, 217 ; hunger strikes and sui- 
cides, 217, 218 ; exiles under po- 
lice surveillance, 218, 219 ; distin- 
guished persons condemned to, 219- 
222 ; statements by humble victims 
of, 223, 224 ; official objections to, 



284 



INDEX 



225; preliminary measures for ab- 
olition of, 226. 

Siberian railroad, 186. 

Sibir, city of, 182. 

" Signers," religious sect, 170. 

Sigida, Hope, flogged to death, 156. 

Sir Darya basin, acquired by Russia, 
191. 

Sixteenth century, 60, 61. 

Skobelev, Gen., 194-197. 

Slav nature worship, 3, 4, 5. 

Sobors, or national assemblies, 268- 
270. 

Sochaczewski, Alexander, 204. 

Soloviev, historian, 27, 151. 

Sophia Alex^yevna, daughter of Alexel 
Mikhailovich, 67. 

State, opposition to, by religious re- 
formers, 162. 

Stenko Razyn leads insurrection, 126. 

Streltsy, insurrection and extermina- 
tion of, 71 ; history of insurrection 
by Matveyev, 238. 

Stroganov, family of, 182. 

Stundists, religious sect, 168, 172. 

Sumarokov, dramatic writer, 243. 

Sutayev, evangelist, 171. 

Suvorov, Gen., campaigns in western 
Europe, 102, 103. 

Suzdal, 34, 44, 50 ; rivalry with Kiev, 
45, 53 ; chronicles of, 232. 

Svyatogor, mythical hero, 233. 

Svyatoslav, 27. 

Swedes defeated by Alexander Nev- 
sky, 52. 

Ta-lien-wan, 186. 

Tashkent, 189, 197. 

Tatar-Mongols, invasion and domina- 
tion of Russia by, 47 ; period of yoke 
imposed by, 48 ; chiefs of Mongol 
nation in Asia, 48 ; end of " yoke," 
48 ; character of " yoke," 48-50 ; 
payment of tribute to, 50 ; modifica- 
tion of Russian life by, 50. 

Tatishchev, history of Russia by, 243. 

Taylor, Bayard, characterizations of 
Russian empire by, 23, 263. 

Tekk^-Turkomans, 193 ; defense of 
Geok-Tepe by, 194 ; storming of the 
fortress of, by Skobelev, 194, 195 ; 
massacre of, 195. 



Theodosians, religious sect, 165. 

Tiumen, forwarding prison, 209-211. 

Tobacco permitted in Russia, 79. 

Tobolsk, 182, 206. 

Tolstoy, Count Leo, novelist, religious 
and social views of, 171 ; describes 
party of exiles in " Resurrection," 
214. 

Tolstoy, Count Dmitry A., minister of 
public instruction, 147. 

Tomsk, 223 ; forwarding prison of, 212. 

Torture, under the criminal code, 38 ; 
by Ivan Vassilyevich and Ivan the 
Terrible, 54-56 ; by Peter the Great, 
71, 83. 

Tourgu^neff , writings against serfdom 
130, 131; relation to "Nihilism," 
140 ; as novelist, 250. 

Transcaspia, military district, 194. 

Treaties, Nystadt, 82, 180 ; China, 84; 
Abo, 92 ; Aix-la-Chapelle, 92 ; Til- 
sit, 105 ; Frederikshamn, 106, 180 ; 
Vienna (1814), 107 ; Holy Alliance, 
107 ; Paris (1856), 123 ; San Stefano, 
124 ; London (1871), 124 ; Berlin 
(1878), 124 ; Bukharest, 180 ; Ner- 
chinsk, 184 ; Aigun, 185 ; Pekin, 
186. 

Tredyakovsky, conspirator, 243. 

Tre"pov, Gen., 150. 

Trubetskoy, Catherine, 220. 

Trubetskoy, conspirator, 220. 

Tsebrikova, Madame, punishment of, 
156. 

Tver, republic of, absorbed by Russia, 
56 ; provincial assembly of, 158 ; 
chronicles of, 232. 

Twelfth century, 40. 

Udyelny system, 30-35, 40, 41-43, 46, 
50 ; functions of prince under, 34, 
35 ; settlement by conquest and colo- 
nization under, 179. 

Uniats, religious body, 173. 

Ussuri, 185, 186. 

Valdai, mountain range, 9. 

Varyags, Scandinavian origin of, 24 ; 
invitation extended to, 25 ; Varyag 
administration of Russia by, 25-27. 

V6che\ or folkmote, 35-38; broken 
up, 56. 



INDEX 



285 



Verevkin, Gen., 191. 

Vienna, Treaty of, 107. 

Village industries, 261. 

Viluisk, Chevnishevsky exiled to, 221, 

222. 
Vladimir, champions Christianity, 28 ; 

exploits of, celebrated in byliny, 

235 ; beautifies Kiev, 42, 43. 
Vladimir (city), 44, 51, 54 ; official 

residence of Bogolyiibsky, 46. 
Vladivostok, 186. 
Volga, 10. 

Volhynia, chronicles of, 232. 
Vorotinsky burnt by Ivan the Terrible, 

56. 
Vyatka, republic of, 37 ; absorbed by 

Russia, 56. 

"War and Peace," novel by Tolstoy, 
251. 

Wars, with Sweden, 72, 75, 82, 91, 101 
Turks, 69, 88, 101, 124 ; France, 88 
Prussia, 92, 102, 106 ; Persia, 101 
Great Britain, 103 ; against the 
Hungarians, 121 ; Crimean War, 
122. 

Warsaw, bombardment of, 121. 



" What 's to be Done ?" novel by Cher- 
nishevsky, 249. 

Winter Palace, feature of St. Peters- 
burg, 110 ; explosion in, 152 ; Alex- 
ander Second carried to, 154. 

Wolkhonsky, 220. 

Women, emancipation of, by Peter the 
Great, 77 ; condition of, under Do- 
mostroy, 142-144; women's ques- 
tion, 144. 

Wrasskoy, Galkin, report on Siberian 
lazarets, 215. 

Yakutsk, 183 ; massacre at, 155. 
Yaroslav (ruler), 33, 40, 62 ; embel- 
lishes Kiev, 43. 
Yaroslav (city), 44. 
Yeneseisk, 183. 
Yermak, 181, 182. 
Yomuds, extermination of, 192. 

Zaandam, voyage of Peter the Great 

to, 69, 70. 
Zabaikal, 205. 
Zemstva, or provincial assemblies, 

136. 
Zhukovsky, poet, 245. 



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